would destroy the authenticity of the account of his journey. She wrote that reporters have to accept that they are going to see a lot of misery in such an assignment. This is an emotional struggle, especially when children are involved. For example, Enrique realized that he did not have a telephone number for his mother in North Carolina, so he had to work for two weeks to raise enough money to make a telephone call to Honduras to get the number. All the while, Nazario had a cell phone, which she kept out of sight. “Sometimes you need to watch that play out to be able to write a really powerful story. Those aren’t often things the public understands very well. I got some emails that basically said, ‘Aren’t you a human being? How could you do this?’”
Nazario devised a test for an intervention decision: “The dividing line was whether or not I felt the child was in imminent danger. Not discomfort, not “things are going really badly,” not “I haven’t eaten in twenty‐four hours.” … The bottom line on all this is that I try not to do anything I can’t live with.”
Riding on top of a freight train, the Times journalists shared danger with the children they were observing. Of course, the reporters had resources their subjects did not, resources they did not flaunt. Nazario wrote: “When I was on top of the train I would refrain from calling my husband until I could go to a part of the train that was empty. I would never eat in front of the kids. I would never drink water in front of the kids.”
Ultimately, the reporter did not accompany Enrique on the Rio Grande crossing. Here, ethical questions were intertwined with legal ones. “If I was with a child and was viewed as helping him across, then that would be aiding and abetting, which is a felony,” Nazario wrote. But she did think in advance of what she might do if she were in the water with Enrique: “Crossing the Rio Grande is a very dangerous challenge. Hundreds of people drown there, sucked under by whirlpools. … I was going to have an inner tube, even though I’m a former lifeguard. … If the kid’s in trouble in the water I was obviously going to help him, but short of that I was not going to help him. He would not use my inner tube because that would be altering reality, and I didn’t want to do that, if at all possible.”
In the Point of View essay accompanying this chapter, Halle Stockton of PublicSource.org describes how reporters Wendy Ruderman and Barbara Laker of the Philadelphia Daily News immediately reported to authorities in November 2013 when they suspected that a 47‐year‐old disabled man was being regularly beaten by his “caretaker.” In response to a neighbor’s tip, the reporters visited the apartment where the man lived with his presumed assailant, a 48‐year‐old woman who was the payee for his disability payments and food stamp allowance. Finding the man bruised and apparently ill, Ruderman and Laker called a state‐run hotline, and the man was relocated. The reporters followed developments in the case and published their story in January 2014.
It is instructive to compare the Philadelphia episode to the case study at the end of this chapter, “The Journalist as a Witness to Suffering.” In the Philadelphia case, the reporters notified authorities two months before publishing anything; in the Los Angeles case, involving neglected children living with adult addicts, the authorities learned of the situation when the story was published. In each case, the authorities came to the aid of the victims, and in each case, the journalists called the public’s attention to systemic problems in the social welfare system.
After taking this picture of a fugitive fleeing police, newspaper photographer Russ Dillingham tackled him at an officer’s request.
Photo by Russ Dillingham. Reprinted by permission of The Sun Journal.
The cases differ in two significant ways that could influence a journalist’s intervention decision. First, the Los Angeles Times journalists had arranged to observe life in the addicts’ homes over an extended period so that they could meticulously document the problems of children living under those conditions, and reporting the case immediately would have made it impossible to deliver that evidence to their readers. The Philadelphia Daily News reporters had made no such arrangements with the subjects of their story; acting on a citizen’s tip, they went to the apartment and determined that the evidence appeared to corroborate the tip. Second, the Philadelphia case indicated imminent danger to the victim; the children in the Los Angeles case, though horribly neglected, were not in that kind of danger.
Helping police catch a suspect
When photographer Russ Dillingham of the Lewiston (Maine) Sun Journal heard on the police radio that officers had cornered a fugitive in an apartment building, he rushed to the scene. He watched from the ground while police searched the third floor. “I’ve been doing this a long time,” the 25‐year veteran said later. “I kind of figured he’d be where the cops weren’t.”
His calculation was correct. He started taking pictures as the fugitive, Norman Thompson, leaped from the building’s balcony onto a garage roof next door. From there, Thompson jumped to the ground – “like a cat,” Dillingham remembered later.
“Tackle him, Russ! Tackle him!” Detective Sergeant Adam Higgins called down.
Dropping his camera, Dillingham chased Thompson, tackled him, and held him down until the officers could catch up. Then he retrieved his camera and photographed Thompson as he was handcuffed and taken to jail on multiple charges of automobile theft and fleeing police in high‐speed car chases. Thompson was not armed, but Dillingham hadn’t known that when he made his tackle.
Police praised Dillingham, saying they could not have made the arrest without the photographer’s help. The Sun Journal’s executive editor, Rex Rhoades, also was effusive: “We’re all very proud of Russ. He’s a stud.”7
However, in a column in News Photographer, ethics scholar Paul Martin Lester raised questions about the 2007 incident, including: What if Dillingham had been severely injured? What if the suspect had been injured and sued Dillingham? What if the suspect was innocent? What happens the next time Dillingham is asked by police for help? What if a more dangerous suspect mistakes him for a cop? Lester noted that the ethics code of the National Press Photographers Association says photographers should not “intentionally contribute to, alter, or seek to alter or influence events.” He recommended that Dillingham and his colleagues meet with the police to make clear that tackling suspects is not something journalists will do in the future, and that officers should not take it personally when they refuse.8
Dillingham’s decision was instinctive. “In a split second, I made a decision to be a citizen, a community member, an American,” he said. “I did what I thought was right and would do it again in a heartbeat.”9 “You don’t even think about it,” Dillingham said. “You just react.” In his column Lester made it clear he wasn’t criticizing Dillingham but urging that journalists think in advance about how to respond to situations they might face, much as a baseball fielder anticipates what he will do if the ball is hit in his direction.10
Dillingham was not confronted with saving someone from death, injury, or suffering. Instead, the photographer was asked to help the police do their jobs. Lester made a case for saying no. Yet, refusing to tackle the suspect would have almost certainly subjected Dillingham and the journalism profession to scorn not only from the police but from the public as well. What kind of citizen would not stop someone fleeing from police officers, especially when the officers are asking him to do so?
Both the police and the journalists who cover them have important missions in the community, and sometimes those missions are in conflict. Such a conflict occurs when, after a riot, the police ask the news media to turn over photographs and
