The Ethical Journalist. Gene Foreman

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СКАЧАТЬ could have spent all their time helping victims, but then they could not have done their reporting. The public, including the victims of the hurricane, desperately needed reliable information that only journalists could provide.

      Generally speaking, journalists should be detached observers who avoid intervention in the events they are covering. There are two good reasons for this:

      1 Intervention changes the nature of the event, rendering it no longer authentic.

      2 Intervention can lead the audience to perceive bias on the journalist’s part.

      However, to say that the journalists choices in Katrina were complex rather than obvious does not mean that their decisions to give aid were wrong. They were temporarily subordinating the moral obligations of their profession to their moral obligations as human beings. If they hadn’t intervened, suffering or death might have resulted.

      The ethicist Michael Josephson told Smolkin flatly that the journalist’s primary obligation is to act as a human being. “We shouldn’t be too finicky about the notion that rendering some simple assistance would compromise objectivity.” He said that, when people are in dire straits, “the more obligated someone is, regardless of who they are, to render assistance. The other factor is whether there are others there who can render assistance.” Sometimes, he said, journalists could fulfill their moral duty by summoning help.²

      In contrast, Paul McMasters of the Freedom Forum’s First Amendment Center was equivocal. He said factors to consider before getting involved were “how natural or instinctive the journalist’s impulse is and whether or not there is a potential for immediate harm or injury without the journalist’s involvement.” McMasters cautioned that when a journalist acts as a relief worker, “you’re not observing, you’re not taking notes; you’re not seeing the larger picture.” It is very important, he said, that journalists return to their professional role “as soon as the moment passes.”³

      In most situations in Katrina, the journalists were not reporting on the people they helped, or the storm victims’ plight was tangential to the larger stories being written. But, for Anne Hull of The Washington Post, intervention would have kept her from reporting the story. That made her decision heartbreaking.

      Hull wrote about Adrienne Picou and her six‐year‐old grandson in a poignant Post article headlined “Hitchhiking from squalor to anywhere else.” She found the pair near an interstate exit ramp and told how they had twice become homeless, once from the flood and then from “the dire conditions of the city Convention Center.” On the boy’s red Spider‐man shirt his grandmother had written, “Eddie Picou, DOB 10/9/98,” just in case they became separated or his body was found.

      After the interview, Adrienne Picou asked the reporter for a ride to Baton Rouge. Although Hull did not have a car, she knew a colleague who did. But Hull explained to Picou that she had to sit down to start writing. As Hull sat under an interstate overpass typing the story on her laptop, a medic in a rescue truck asked her for directions. Hull pointed to the Picous. “See that woman and child over there? She will know, and she needs your help.”

      The medic initially declined, but Hull pleaded, and the Picous were given the first ride on their journey out of New Orleans. That journey led to a shelter in northern Louisiana to a cattle ranch in Texas to a new job in Smyrna, Georgia.

      Hull, who had handed out water and PowerBars to hurricane victims, felt torn over refusing to give the Picous a ride. “How can you explain to somebody you can’t take them to a shelter?” But she also told Smolkin, “I believe journalists should have an ethical framework to guide them, and in the case of covering catastrophe or hardship, we must try to remember that we are journalists trying to cover a story. That is our role in the world, and if we perform it well, it is an absolutely unique service: helping the world understand something as it happens.”⁴

More than four years after Katrina, journalists covering the January 2010 earthquake in Haiti were confronted with similar conflicts. The Society of Professional Journalists, while praising the journalists for their humane acts, cautioned that they should “avoid making themselves part of the stories they are reporting.” Kevin Smith, then the SPJ president, said in a statement:

Advocacy, self‐promotion, offering favors for news and interviews, injecting oneself into the story or creating news events for coverage is not objective reporting, and it ultimately calls into question the ability of a journalist to be independent. … No one wants to see human suffering, and reporting on these events can certainly take on a personal dimension. But participating in events, even with the intention of dramatizing the humanity of the situation, takes news reporting in a different direction and places journalists in a situation they should not be in, and that is one of forgoing their roles as informants.5

      Observer or Participant?

      In the episodes described below, journalists had to decide instantly whether they would step out of their roles as detached observers. They illustrate the importance of ethical preparation by journalists: thinking through the situations they might face and deciding – often in consultation with other journalists – how they will respond. This is the kind of preparation that editor Sandra Rowe of The Oregonian mentioned in Chapter 1.

      “Fly‐on‐the‐wall” reporting

Sonia Nazario envisioned worst‐case scenarios she might encounter in doing the arduous fieldwork for “Enrique’s Journey,” a 2002 Los Angeles Times series that told the story of young Latinos who traveled from Central America to join parents working in the United States. Nazario is the Times reporter who wrote the “Orphans of Addiction” series discussed in the case study “The Journalist as a Witness to Suffering.” In preparing for “Enrique’s Journey,” Nazario drew on lessons learned in the earlier series. “Enrique’s Journey” won Pulitzer Prizes for both Nazario and photographer Don Bartletti.

      To report realistically on the 48,000 Latino children who have made the lonely journey, the Times journalists followed a boy from Honduras who was trying to reach his mother. Enrique was five years old when his mother left; he was seventeen when they were reunited in North Carolina.

      Nazario and Bartletti followed Enrique and other children, observing them through the majority of the trip, most notably as they rode on the tops of freight trains in Mexico. Nazario followed in Enrique’s footsteps to conduct interviews and make observations that would enable her to reconstruct parts of the journey that she did not witness.

      In an article in Nieman Reports ⁶, Nazario defined her journalistic purpose:

      to try to give an unflinching look at what this journey is like for these children and what these separations are like through one thread, through one child. I wanted to take the audience into this world, which I assume most readers would never see otherwise. I tried to bring it to them as vividly as possible so they could smell what it’s like to be on top of the train. They could feel it. They could see it. They literally would feel like they were alongside him.

      Nazario knew that she would be confronted with difficult decisions about whether to continue to observe or to intervene to make the journey easier for Enrique and the other children. “You have to think these things out ahead of time,” Nazario wrote, “because things can happen so quickly that it’s too late to react in an appropriate way if you’re not prepared.” As part of the preparation, Nazario spent time at federal shelters and jails along the border, and interviewed children who had made the entire journey.

      She СКАЧАТЬ