The Ethical Journalist. Gene Foreman
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Shuford. It was no secret – she treated him like “a punching bag,” one man said.
“You gotta get him outta there,” he said, stealing a look at Floods’ house.
Wendy Ruderman (left) and Barbara Laker of the Philadelphia Daily News, who won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for investigative reporting.
Photo by David Maialetti, courtesy of the Philadelphia Daily News.
The journalists called about Shuford to a state‐run hotline established under the Adult Protective Services Act to field reports of abuse or neglect of adults ages 18 to 59 with physical or intellectual disabilities.
Investigators with the Department of Public Welfare and the Philadelphia Police Department got involved, and Shuford was removed from the home about a week later.
He revealed scars, whip marks and other injuries that he said were a result of his caretaker’s abuse.
At the time of the story, Shuford had moved in with his brother.
The reporters’ actions were certainly not characteristic of a fly on the wall, but they got a vulnerable person out of harm’s way.
Though the caretaker is not a politician or a company CEO, she still held a position of power, and their reporting held her accountable.
And with this reporting, they also illuminated some deficiencies in the state’s enactment of the law meant to protect this population.
All characteristics of great journalism.
This essay was published on February 20, 2014, on PublicSource.org, an independent organization in Pittsburgh that produces in‐depth reporting on social issues, criminal justice, money and politics, and the environment in Pennsylvania. Quotations in the essay are from Wendy Ruderman and Barbara Laker’s article “Disabled man kept virtual hostage -- until one phone call,” Philadelphia Daily News, January 31, 2014.
Case Study: Documenting the Trauma of Children Living With Addicts
The Journalist as a Witness to Suffering
WHEN WRITER SONIA NAZARIO and photographer Clarence Williams set out in 1997 to document the lives of children in homes where the adults were drug and alcohol addicts, they wanted to show the suffering of these children with what Nazario called “grab‐you‐by‐the‐throat” reality.
Only by being detached, “fly‐on‐the‐wall” observers, the Los Angeles Times journalists reasoned, could they report with power what life is like, day in and day out, for the millions of American children who grow up in these dire circumstances. And only powerful journalism could motivate citizens and their elected representatives to alleviate their suffering.
For three months, Nazario and Williams spent long days with two Long Beach families, one with a three‐year‐old girl named Tamika and the other with siblings, eight‐year‐old Kevin and ten‐year‐old Ashley. In a two‐part series in November 1997, “Orphans of Addiction,” Nazario described some of the scenes the journalists watched:
Tamika going 24 hours without eating, while her mother focuses on her own hunger for drugs.
With her mother out looking for drugs, Tamika passing the time alone in the kitchen, “where she steps on shards from a broken jar. The toddler hobbles to the sofa, sits down, and digs two pieces of glass from her bleeding feet. Not a tear is shed.”
The mother so “intent on smoking the last crumbs of crack, she gently lowers her girl onto a mattress moist with urine and semen. As Mom inhales, Tamika sleeps, her pink and white sundress absorbing the fluids of unknown grownups.”
Kevin and Ashley missing school for four months because their father worries that enrolling them “might bring too much attention to them – and to him – from campus officials.” Sometimes, Nazario wrote, Ashley “walks to a nearby elementary school so she can watch the children spill out onto the playground.”
Kevin’s father disparaging his emotionally troubled, rebellious son as a “retard” and disciplining him by letting his hand fly. He “beats me all the time,” Kevin said. “I don’t want to be like him. He’s nasty. He’d be nice if he didn’t use drugs.”
Kevin and Ashley going weeks without bathing, in part because the bathtub “brims with dirty clothes alive with fleas.” At one point, Kevin rummages through a dumpster looking for clothes for his sister, finding a pair of canvas shoes. When the shoes turn out to be too small, “a familiar look of disappointment crosses her face.”
In the spring of 1997, looking for subjects for their story, Nazario approached about 50 parents in the social services office of a university before settling on the mother of Tamika and the father of Kevin and Ashley.
The editor directing the Times investigation, Joel Sappell, told Susan Paterno of American Journalism Review in 1998: “My only instruction was: Don’t tamper with reality. … We’re making a documentary here. … Don’t intrude into it. Because that changes it.”
Reflecting on the assignment a decade later, Nazario wrote: “I believe that witnessing some suffering, even by children, was acceptable if those children were not in imminent danger and if I thought the telling of their story in the most powerful way possible might lead to a greater good.” (The italics are Nazario’s.)
She said: “I was clear in my mind about one thing. If I felt these children were in imminent danger, I would immediately report them to child welfare authorities. Yes, they were clearly being neglected. Yet I never felt the three children I spent time with were in imminent danger.”
One factor that gave Nazario confidence was that at least two individuals, a neighbor and a nearby pastor, were keeping “a careful eye” on the children. “When the children got hungry, or needed help, they would often go a few blocks away to Pastor Bill Thomas in Long Beach and ask for food or assistance or advice.” She said Pastor Thomas agreed with her that the children were not in imminent danger.
Nazario pointed out that if she and Williams had immediately told authorities about the neglect of the children they observed, there would have been no story. Not only would they have been ejected from the homes they were observing, but word would have quickly spread in the neighborhood, and it would have been “very difficult or impossible for me to gain the trust of another family.” Sometimes, she said, “it is necessary to witness some harm to be able to tell a story in the most powerful way. Your goal is to move people to act in a way that might bring about positive change.”
But the Times did not make clear the surveillance of the neighbor or pastor, nor did it explain to readers any ground rules that the reporter and photographer had set for themselves. When the story came out, readers blistered the Times for callously allowing children to suffer so the paper could have a good story.
Nazario recounted the criticism: “I had watched a girl go hungry for 24 hours and done nothing. I had allowed these children to be neglected. Someone who claimed to be a child abuse investigator called three times to let me know he had urged police to arrest me. … [One reader said], ‘Was winning an award so important to you that you would risk the life of a three‐year‐old child to do so?’”
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