4 For Journalists, a Clash of Moral Duties Responsibilities as professionals and as human beings can conflict.

      Learning Goals

      This chapter will help you understand:

WHEN HURRICANE KATRINA struck New Orleans and the Gulf Coast in late August 2005, journalists arriving to report the disaster often felt morally obliged to assume the role of relief workers. Assessing their experience a few months later in American Journalism Review, Rachel Smolkin found

countless acts of kindness by journalists who handed out food and water to victims, pulled them aboard rescue boats or out of flooded cars, offered them rides to safer ground, lent them cell phones to reassure frantic family members, and flagged down doctors and emergency workers to treat them.1

      At first glance the decision to stop reporting and help may seem obvious: journalists, after all, are human beings. However, their professional responsibility makes the decision more complex. To be blunt, the reason these journalists were sent to the scene was to report the news, not to give aid. If they had chosen to do so, the journalists 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:

      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