Читать книгу The Ethical Journalist - Gene Foreman - Страница 62

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 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.”