Documentary backlash for paid interviews

Erroll Morris, the director of Oscar winning documentary ‘The Fog of War,’ is getting some negative attention for his new picture ‘Standard Operating Procedure.’ The film maker admitted he had paid for several interviews in the movie about abuse and torture at the Abu Ghraib prison.

“I paid the ‘bad apples’ because they asked to be paid, and they would not have been interviewed otherwise,” he said. But not everybody in the community seemed to agree this is standard procedure. Some say it diminishes the credibility of the interviews, while others say it’s “not all that uncommon, it’s just something most people don’t talk about.”

“Sometimes, you’re paying subjects who have nothing,” Diane Weyermann, executive vice president of the company that made the documentary, said. “You’re making a film about them, and you don’t want to exploit them.”

Apparently this is a taboo nobody ever talked about. It’s pretty natural to question an answer when somebody paid for it. Didn’t you ever bribe your little sister in telling your parents you were at home the night before? Now I ask you. Which is more exploiting. When you give her nothing and she doesn’t have to tell anything. Or when you bribe her to tell your parents what you want?