Should the Press Be Human?

KATHERINE WHITEHORN
The Observer
1 If you were asked who shot Lee Harvey Oswald you would probably say Jack
Ruby. But there’s another possible answer to the question: the photographer who shot those
staggering pictures of Ruby gunning him down. And what has teased my mind ever since is
wondering whether, if he had dropped his camera and grabbed the gunman, we might, with
Oswald alive, know more than we will now ever be able to find out about why Kennedy died.
2 Journalists and TV people, we know, are supposed to record what goes on; but in
trying to get the best record they can, they may sometimes seem amazingly cold-blooded. In
the massacre that followed the British quitting India, there was a photographer who made a
sorrowing Indian family bury and rebury its dead several times till he got a perfect shot. A
BBC sound man held up a Nigerian execution for half an hour while he adjusted his sound
equipment; you could say it didn’t make any difference to the final outcome, but it doesn’t
make you feel especially warm towards the man concerned.
3 Should these journalists and photographers join in, or just stand back and watch
while people kill one another? It’s a tricky ethical question, not just a matter of how brave
anyone is feeling at the time; because without authentic pictures, how will the world know,
how should the world believe what atrocities are committed? One dead photographer does
not do much for the cause he cares about, even if he did feel compelled to weigh in and take
sides.
4 Our professional ethic enjoins us to stay uncommitted and report the facts; and, if
we have to have guidelines, that’s probably as good a one as any. Certainly some of the
seediest of journalists, whether we’re talking about the Middle East or Northern Ireland, are
those who pile on one set of adjectives––squalid, butchering, oppressive– for terrorism of
whose aims they disapprove, and quite another set––committed, dedicated, idealistic––for the
same thing done by those they like.
5 But it leaves out a lot. “My complaint against journalists,” a friend of mine once
said, “is not that they behave badly in the course of duty, but their inability to recoil into a
human being when it’s over.” I have not forgotten an occasion over 20 years ago, when a
birdman was going to jump from a Press-filled Rapide. He got his equipment tangled with
the aeroplane in some way, and plunged to his death. As most of them watched in shocked
horror, one newsman ran down the plane with the words: “My God, what a story!”
6 To stay out of the fight, to write down what’s going on, to treat equally with both
sides, as a doctor will stitch up soldiers in either uniform or a lawyer argue for either side––
that is supposed to be our code; and when it comes to the crunch, we probably do better
trying to stick to that, than rushing off on individual impulse.
7 But is there not a point in any profession where you are forced back against the
wall as a human being, where a doctor should hand Jack the Ripper over to the police and a
lawyer refuse to suppress the bloodstained evidence that proves his client a torturer? I think
there is, and I was heartened as well as relieved by one story told in Edward Behr’s book,
Anybody Here Been Raped & Speaks English? During the Algerian confusion, some
Tunisian soldiers were preparing to shoot their prisoners (“what a story”). One journalist, an
Italian, walked over and just calmly stood in front of the wretched man, implying that if the
soldiers shot them, they would have to shoot him too. Finally some officers arrived and
 defused the explosive situation, and just a handful of the lives that went up in that particular
bonfire were saved.
8. A newshound may start out just to get a good story, but it is not impossible, all the same, for
him to end as a man.
I. Paraphrasing:
1. Journalists and TV people, we know, are supposed to record what goes on; but in trying to get
the best record they can, they may sometimes seem amazingly cold-blooded.
2. Should these journalists and photographers join in, or just stand back and watch while people
kill one another? It’s a tricky ethical question, not just a matter of how brave anyone is feeling at
the time; because without authentic pictures, how will the world know, how should the world
believe what atrocities are committed?
3. A newshound may start out just to get a good story, but it is not impossible, all the same, for
him to end as a man.
II. Writing Summaries
This essay consists of two options facing journalists, with arguments and examples supporting
both sides of the issue.
1) Make notes on the two options facing journalists.
2) Write notes on the argument supporting one option.
3) Write notes on the argument supporting the other option.
4) Write notes on what you think the writer’s conclusion is.
Reread the essay and make sure that you have accurately expressed the general idea of the essay.
Finally, join your notes together to form a summary paragraph. Begin each sentence with the
following phrases:
a) The author asks the question…
b) On the one hand…
c) On the other hand…
d) The writer’s conclusion is that…
III. Feedback: