Martin Henry
WHEN HURRICANE KATRINA devastated New Orleans and surrounding areas last August, the area media did not escape its effects. As Jim Amoss of The Times-Picayune newspaper put it, "Like our readers we're also the ones to whom the events happened, at once narrator and subject."
One reporter covering the flooding stood frozen for several minutes as it dawned on him that one of the houses before him being covered by flood waters was his and there would be no going home at the end of covering the disaster.
The Gleaner ran an interesting Associated Press story on Monday, January 16, 'Katrina tested journalists mettle', which said reporters and editors were torn by ethical dilemmas centred on how they could tell the story of the hurricane devastation objectively without letting their own plights get in the way.
Amoss and the 140-member staff of The Times-Picayune slept in sleeping bags and on air mattresses in a bunker at the paper's premises while pumping out news stories over weeks.
Their own personal losses were placed on the back burner as they fired off reports on the devastation.
RODE BICYCLES
Reporters rode bicycles around. One group which went to a Wal-Mart store to buy food and water found the store being looted. Many people in the devastated city caught up in looting were not just looting for looting sake. They were forced by their desperate situation to take the means of survival.
The reporters felt they had three options: just take the items they needed as the other 'looters' were doing, take them and pay for them later [assuming there would be a later of normal Wal-Mart business on location], leave the stuff and walk away empty-handed.
One reporter argued that if they took anything without paying, they would have to write about themselves as part of the looting story. His views won out, and the journalist left without the needed food and water. Very nice guys!
Jamaican journalists must also be part of many of the stories they write. How much of that should be kept out of the media; how much written in? Nobody could cover a major hurricane here and not be a part of that story. Crime is another case. Some weeks ago RJR carried a story of an employee whose mother had gone missing only to turn up as the 'unidentified' woman who had been shot to death downtown days earlier. Crime touches everybody's life in a very immediate and personal way.
Apart from the dilemma of reporting their own involvement as part of 'the story', another side to the issue is how personal impact should shape the way stories are reported.
Precisely because journalists themselves and their families are victims of crime and natural disasters and other negative news events, it would be reasonable to expect a human and humane sensitivity to the reporting of these events affecting other people's lives.
I find, for instance, the fad of thrusting media microphones into the faces of traumatised and grieving family members at the scene of hot tragedies highly distasteful. Nor can I recall a single case when the tear-stained interviewee is Journalist X.
Much less serious, but also an issue nonetheless, is the penchant of the local media to report and 'big up' its own mishaps and difficulties and fairly minor incidents against it in its line of duty. There are professional hazards in every line of business; but most of them are not news.
'EDITORIAL CODE OF PRACTICE'
This newspaper, like many other media houses, has an excellent 'Editorial Code of Practice' which is published on its website. Questions of ethics and objectivity have always engaged media practitioners and media scholars.
And various self-regulatory codes exist. There, is of course, no such thing as absolute objectivity. By the very nature of news as current events which have proximity, relevance, significance and interest to the particular media audience served by a news organ, the news reporter is always part of the audience.
A related issue of the greatest importance is the extent to which the news media simply report the news or create and design the news.
Martin Henry is a communication specialist.
