The Ethical Journalist. Gene Foreman

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One of Williams’s photographs and its caption especially outraged readers. It showed Tamika’s teeth being brushed by her mother’s boyfriend. The caption read: “Johnny brushes Tamika’s teeth with a toothbrush she is sharing this day with Theodora [the mother], who is HIV‐positive. After noticing that her own gums were bleeding, Theodora asked him to clean Tamika’s teeth first.”

      Williams said he took only a couple of frames of the toothbrushing scene. “It all happened so quickly. After it was over, I was, like, whoa, that’s screwed up.”

      On at least two occasions, the journalists did intervene, but those actions were not reported to readers.

      Williams told Susan Paterno for the American Journalism Review article that he saw a baby, left alone in a room, was about to bite down on an electrical cord. “I made one frame, but at that point, it’s crazy. I just ended up holding the baby that afternoon.” When a life is in danger, he said in a 2008 interview, “you help.”

      Nazario told Paterno that she arrived one morning to find Tamika screaming in pain from infected spider bites. She “didn’t think twice” when the mother asked her for a ride to the hospital. “I got into the car and drove her.”

      Both journalists spoke of the anguish they felt during the assignment. “I never cried so much doing a piece,” Williams said in 2008. “I would come home at night and just stare in the mirror and cry.” Nazario told Paterno in 1998: “I think you would not be a human being if you didn’t go into these situations, seeking some of these things, and not coming home with a knot in your stomach.”

      At a seminar at the Poynter Institute in 2002, Nazario said she had to “buffer” herself in the manner that police officers and social workers detach themselves emotionally from the suffering they see. Otherwise, she said, “you couldn’t function day to day doing these kinds of stories. … It is a real balancing act.”

      Describing how she watched Tamika go 24 hours without eating, Nazario told the Poynter seminar: “There were times when I purposefully allowed hunger to play out. I knew that this girl often went 24 hours without eating and I wanted to see that. I was willing to watch that happen. … I was reporting the neglect that occurred to these kids in the most powerful way I could, by putting it on the front page of a major newspaper.”

      After the Times series was published, the county’s child abuse hotline registered a 45 percent increase in reports from the public of children being abused or neglected. More important, the series led to systemic reforms. One of those was a revamping of Los Angeles County’s child abuse hotline after reports surfaced that four people, including a doctor, had reported Tamika’s situation to the hotline without anything being done. More money was put into federal and state programs to provide treatment for addicted women with children.

      A task force representing 20 agencies was set up to identify and help endangered children through the schools and police. Schools in the county changed policies to identify children like Kevin and Ashley who had dropped out of one school but never enrolled in another.

      Even though use of email in 1997 was a fraction of today’s traffic, Nazario received more than 1,000 phone calls and emails. The majority of reader comments were words of praise. One man thanked Nazario on behalf of the three children she had written about: “You may have saved not just their lives, but the lives of millions of other innocent children through-out the country.”

      Tamika was picked up and put in foster care the day the story was published.

      Her mother, Theodora, got free drug rehabilitation treatment at a residential facility whose director had read the story. She lived, clean and sober, at the facility for 18 months only to go back to drugs a few weeks before she was to have regained custody of Tamika. Ultimately, Tamika was adopted by a foster care family.

      Kevin and Ashley had moved with their father to central California before the Times published its report. They came under scrutiny of the social welfare system as a result of the publicity, but authorities decided not to remove the children from their father’s custody.

      Nazario wrote in 2008 that although she would have reported and written the story in much the same way, there are some things she would do differently.

      First, she would write the story in less than the two months she took in 1997, after the three months of observation. “I should have taken greater care to drop in on the children and monitor their situation much more closely during the writing phase.”

      Second, the Times would run a note explaining to readers the rationale for why the journalists chose not to intervene. The Times did consider such a note but decided against it because of an aversion to writing about itself and concerns that a note would detract from the story’s power. For her 2002 series, “Enrique’s Journey” [a Honduran boy’s odyssey described in this chapter], Nazario wrote 7,000 words of footnotes “in an effort to provide greater transparency.”

      Third, she would be much more methodical in thinking through potential ethical dilemmas and deciding in advance how she would react. What are the worst things that could happen? How would I react in an instant?

      After Nazario’s seminar at the Poynter Institute in 2002, Poynter faculty member Bob Steele said the Times journalists had faced a dilemma in which there were competing principles. One principle was the “obligation for the newspaper to reveal the truth about this issue to readers,” Steele told reporter Tran Ha of the Poynter website. Steele continued: “There also is the journalistic principle that journalists do not become overly involved with their sources or subjects in ways that change the story or that will make the newspaper seem as if it is an arm of law enforcement or the government. The third principle is one of minimizing harm and what obligation the journalist has in preventing further harm or profound harm to vulnerable people.”

      Sources

Tran Ha, “A journey through the ‘ethical minefield,’” Poynter, Aug. 1, 2002, updated Mar. 2, 2011.

      Clarence Williams, telephone interview with Shannon Kahle, Aug. 15, 2008.

      Sonia Nazario, reporter, and Clarence Williams, photographer, “Orphans of addiction,” Los Angeles Times, Nov. 16–17, 1997.

      Nazario, email to Gene Foreman, July 17, 2008.

      Susan Paterno, “The intervention dilemma,” American Journalism Review, Mar. 1998.

      Bob Steele, “Journey through the ‘ethical minefield,’ part 2,” Poynter, Aug. 1, 2002, updated Mar. 2, 2011.

      Questions for Class Discussion

       How did the project editor, Joel Sappell, explain the decision to have the reporter and photographer avoid involvement in the story? Do you agree with the decision?

       Should the journalists have agreed in advance on the kinds of situations that would compel them to intervene? Should they have informed readers of those ground rules?

       On at least two occasions the journalists did intervene to protect the children. Did their actions violate their instructions to avoid involvement? Did they damage the story’s authenticity? Should these interventions have been disclosed to the readers?

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