Elizabeth Barret’s documentary about a murder of another documentary filmmaker that occurred in eastern Kentucky in 1960 reveals the dilemma of journalists (outsiders) who try to chronicle the existence from the point-of-view of those living it (insiders). As Barret herself asks, “What are the responsibilities of any of us who take images of other people and put them to our own uses?” Yet, if we look at this documentary closely, we see many other issues that are intellectually and disturbing from an ethical point-of-view. For example, the film purports that the poor, uneducated, dirty, toothless Appalachians we are used to in mainstream media portrayals are only some Appalachians. Because of this negative media portrayal, the filmmaker contends that the natives of these regions withdrew into themselves and their communities, with everyone else representing an “outsider” who was merely trying to label all Appalachians poor, uneducated, toothless, and dirty.
Therefore, according to the filmmaker, when promising young Canadian filmmaker Hugh O’Connor came to town in order to chronicle the “insiders”, he was setting himself up as an unwelcome “outsider”. In fact, claims Barret, O’Connor was not trying to show the poor, uneducated plight of Appalachians, but was instead trying to show how there are similarities in human culture that beyond demographic and geographic lines. Therefore, a more disturbing issue in this film that the confusion over the journalistic ethics blankets is the fact that the man who killed O’Connor eventually served only a year for his crime. What is significant about this fact is that convicted murderer Hobart Ison was a respected landowner in the community. He rented run-down cabins to poor coalminers. He says he killed O’Connor because it was his right to protect his land (which O’Connor was on filming a poor family) and the re
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