In a message dated 10/2/2008 7:13:37 A.M. Pacific Daylight Time, snowspinner@gmail.com writes:

Yeah, because Wikipedia works much better when it can behave more sociopathically.>> --------------- Or others would call this "normative". Doctors use "do no harm". Writers do not use this.

It is the norm in writing biographies, that you in fact include things which could "harm" the person in some way. For example, right now I'm reading the book on the Johnson&Johnson will contest. In that book, they go into details about events that transpired in the newspapers 20 years earlier. I'm sure everyone at the time had forgotten these things. They were front-page news when they occurred.

So the author is "dredging up" if you will, things forgotten, and the fact that anew people are reading or remembering these old negative events could "harm" the person in today's world where most people don't know it.

If a modern biographer covered those details up simply because people had "forgotten" them, they would be laughed out of the club. It is simply not the way writers write. Hagiographers, now that's a different story.

Remembering that "investigative journalists" include confrontation and shock, biographers merely repeat and present. In addition investigative journalists tend to only present a tiny slice of a person's life, biographers try to present the entire life. They are not the same thing.

That doesn't mean that biographers cause no harm. Because they do. And we need to follow the norms of that occupation, not the norms of some other occupation.

Will Johnson

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