Ethics in International Reporting: Term Paper

By leahkmillis

July 2, 2011

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Ariel enjoyed the ocean's waves as he laid on a beach in Jacmel Oct. 17, 2010.

What follows is a term paper I wrote for Ethics and Legal Issues in Journalism this spring. Please note that this is coming from a student, not a scholar. Any corrections or disagreements are welcomed, please comment below if you care to. Thanks again to those interviewed.

The issue of ethics will always play an important role in the choices journalists and editors make when covering the news. There has been a consistent argument since institutions began to teach journalism about how to paint the idea of ethics. Some say there is a gray area while others vehemently disagree. The ethical lines seem to blur even more when applied overseas, more specifically in impoverished, warring or developing nations. Judy Walgren, a Pulitzer Prize-winning photojournalist with extensive overseas experience, currently the director of photography at The San Francisco Chronicle, believes that because many developing nations have no ethical standards themselves, the people don’t know to protect themselves, “the people you’re photographing are usually illiterate, uneducated and they have no idea what an ethical standard is. They are basically just trying to survive.”

Though this practice isn’t exclusive to Haiti, the country proves to be a good example of this phenomenon. The extremely impoverished country has a complex history, starting with its birth as the first ever successful slave rebellion when the country won its independence in 1804 led by ex-slave Francois Dominique Toussaint Louverture (Clammer 265).

For the next 200 years Haiti saw turmoil when one dictator after another rose and fell like a never ending tide. Haiti saw hardship through the U.S. Marine occupation to the ruthless reigns of both dictators Papa and Baby Doc to the country’s most recent year of crisis. In 2010 it was struck with a magnitude 7.0 earthquake which resulted in more than 250,000 dead, more than 1 million people homeless and later that year a cholera outbreak which has since killed more than 4,000 people. Because of the history Haiti’s most powerful neighbor, the U.S., has with race issues, Haiti has been left wide-open for sensational, negative and false reporting of its history and current issues. Much of the coverage has ended up severely hurting Haiti’s image and thus delivering a large blow to its tourism industry and economy. The fanciful coverage of Haiti has perpetuated myths and racist beliefs relating to Haiti and its people:

Haiti may capture the headlines of the American popular press, but understanding of what is at stake here remains, at best, persistently superficial. At worst, journalistic writing about Haiti distorts events and processes in predictable ways, helping perpetuate a series of particularly potent myths about Haiti and Haitians. All of this together-distortions, half-truths, myths, old and new-leaves even people of good will and discernment puzzled as to what is really happening in Haiti. (Farmer 41)

In journalism it seems most discussions on ethics focus on the problem with fabricating either written stories or visual situations by altering them somehow. In photojournalism it seems the most common problem with photographers is the setting up of scenes. Additionally, internationally and in the U.S. there’s always the question of when to draw the line– do you help or take the photograph first? But one thing that most journalists seem to agree upon is the importance of telling the truth. When looking at whether a person is reporting ethically in a country like Haiti, this is the question that most commonly comes up: is this accurate? Even outside of Haiti, painting an accurate representation of a situation or community isn’t always completely objective according to Hartford Courant photographer Bettina Hansen;

More of the issues that I have with ethics are not about setting up pictures, they are about accurately representing your community. I see so many papers, mine included, and especially in Baton Rouge, where the newsrooms do not reflect the community in terms of diversity and life experience. I think that to do a service to readers, journalism needs [show] more diversity, because I see a lot of coverage of race being one-sided, since newsrooms are disproportionately made up of white males.

The importance of fair reporting is made clearly in the National Press Photographers Association Code of Ethics under bullet points 3 and 4:

Be complete and provide context when photographing or recording subjects. Avoid stereotyping individuals and groups. Recognize and work to avoid presenting one’s own biases in the work. Treat all subjects with respect and dignity. Give special consideration to vulnerable subjects and compassion to victims of crime or tragedy. Intrude on private moments of grief only when the public has an overriding and justifiable need to see. (Kobre 257)

When it comes to the manipulation of a scene, of six journalists interviewed, all of them were hardline on not interfering with the scene. Their opinions differed, though, when it came to the question of when it’s appropriate to administer aid before documenting the scene. For Maggie Steber, an award-winning photojournalist who has worked internationally and extensively in Haiti for the past 33 years for multiple publications including National Geographic, it’s important to help when you can unless it is too dangerous, or the act becomes impossible;

In terms of photographing suffering, again, it depends on the situation. A man was shot after the Haiti quake in front of the cemetery. He had been shot in the stomach and had vomited up his lunch…He was dying…No one around him would help him, although he was asking in a low voice for help. I asked the Haitians to help me and they said he was a robber and the police had shot him and not to touch him. He was an escapee from the penitentiary. I looked at him, his wound was very bad and he was near death and there were so many other people at the hospitals that needed help…I had no car to put him in and couldn’t get a taxi to stop, or the police. Inside the walls of the cemetery just near the entrance were more bodies, people who had been shot and dumped. I could do nothing so I took a few pictures halfheartedly and left.

Though she was unable to save the man in Haiti in that situation, Steber stated that though some journalists may disagree, she believes it’s important that she’s a journalist and a humanitarian. It’s her policy to help, “I will not photograph anything violent that I could stop, anyone being stoned or chased or shot at but there are times when you can’t stop it, it’s too dangerous and you would only be hurt as well. Sometimes, however, you can save a life,” she said. Haiti has had a long and entangled history with the U.S. and Western media. Often the media has painted Haiti in a sensational light, feeding off of the hysteria and violence that has plagued the country for decades, also oftentimes leaving out U.S. involvement and subsequent responsibility at the cost of the Haitians:

In 1982, it was discovered in the hospitals of New York and Florida that there were patients of Haitian origin suffering from the AIDS virus who could be classified as neither homosexuals, nor as drug addicts. In the press, Haitians were therefore characterized as “a group at risk” and were described according to old formulas about Vodou and misery. In Aids and Accusation, his work on the analysis of rumors surrounding Haitians and AIDS in the United States, Paul Farmer shows precisely the mechanisms that led the American press to make Haitians the scapegoat for the AIDS epidemic. (Vodou 193)

Today it seems that ethical standards still differ in Haiti. Sensationalism is still common when it comes to the media’s coverage of the country. Newsweek printed an article on Nov. 11, 2010, titled Haiti in the Time of Cholera: An intense reporting trip to the battered nation ends with a hurricane and a lesson in survival. The article, written by Steve Tuttle, is a first-hand account of the writer’s first trip to Haiti. The article was not received well, many accused Tuttle of sensational reporting and shoddy journalism. Eleanor Miller, a reader, summed up dozens of comments when she said, “This is one of the most poorly-written ‘articles’ about Haiti I’ve seen in a long time. It’s not deserving of a national audience.” (Tuttle 1) Tuttle describes a dramatic scene that ended in him paying his subjects because he feared for his safety:

If you’ve ever watched a bad horror movie, you know what occurred next. He turned the ignition key and nothing happened. It didn’t make a sound. He did it again. Again. Again, and again. Five times in all. I know because I counted, and on the fifth try it turned over. I hopped in the back, and dug through my bag for something to give them. I only had a little bit of food, but I handed some beef jerky out the window while I looked for more. There was much unhappy murmuring in Creole, and Elioner leaned over the back seat and whispered frantically, “money … money … money.” (Yes, you can whisper frantically.) He told the crowd I would hand it to only one man, and about a dozen people stepped toward us in unison, ignoring his direction. It was like a nightmare game of Simon Says. Finally I found a handful of five-dollar bills in a money belt, and handed them out the window. One man took them, and then the scene dissolved into a melee of yelling and grabbing, and we drove off down the road, where we picked up Bolfo and made a quick exit. (Tuttle 2)

Such a sensational account harkens back to the old novels and black and white films depicting Haitians as black savages and voodoo zombies. The account shows that even in modern times, Western media is still guilty of baffling unethical reporting. Though not all reporting is so obviously slanted, some journalists find themselves reporting the same story repeatedly, which can be just as harmful to a country. After covering Haiti for years through Baby Doc’s fall from power, Steber began to realize her reporting in Haiti was becoming fairly one-sided and it was an unfair representation of the country:

I continued to go as events kept happening, many violent events laced with some dashed hopes and ultimately I became enraptured with Haiti. But that was also because I read the history, about the culture, as a photographer, you really must become an observer to figure out what is important to the Haitian people, not what you think is important…And after a while I realized I was only showing one aspect of Haiti so I started to go when it was peaceful and quiet and I saw the beauty and the courage of the people… I realized their stories needed to be told in full and that I was so hopelessly in love with the people and country, that I would try to do that with my work.

Ansel Herz has been living in Haiti almost continuously since September 2009, he speaks fluent Haitian Creole and freelances out of Port-au-Prince for such organizations as Reuters Alertnet, New York Daily News, PBS Newshour and Agence France Presse. Because Herz speaks the language, he has experienced widespread ethical breaches by the Western or popular media in the form of ignorance and indifference to the point of injury to the Haitian people:

The need for careful, ethical journalism in places like Haiti is completely subordinated to its long-fixed place in the global media marketplace as a source for stories on poverty, crises, violence, and little else. Journalists come to Haiti with stereotypes in mind, with certain pre-conceived images and stories that they want to broadcast back home, and because Haiti is so poor they can get away with it. Do they apply different ethical standards than they would back home? Of course! It goes beyond the individual indignities inflicted on Haitians by journalists to the concept of international reporting as practiced by leading Western journalists in places like Haiti.

A big issue seen by some is that in Haiti and in other foreign situations many times the Western media ignore the voices of the actual people who live in the country and leave them out of their reporting. Herz, a Westerner himself, has seen plenty examples of this during his time in Haiti, “a recent New York Times article on Sean Penn’s humanitarian work in Haiti failed to quote a single Haitian living in the camp his NGO supposedly serves. Poor Haitians are at worst invisible to foreign journalists, and often at best, seen as stand-ins for poverty as a whole rather than sovereign human beings with a rights, history, and culture…” he said.

Not all questionable ethical situations are seen as completely hurtful toward the country. For example, The Washington Post’s Carol Guzy, Nikki Kahn and Ricky Carioti recently won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize for Breaking News Photography for their work in Haiti after the earthquake. Many people believe it was the work of this team and dozens of others that helped alert the world to the severity of the situation in Haiti, thus prompting aid and billions of dollars in donations and pledges. Craig F. Walker, seasoned Pulitzer Prize winning photojournalist for The Denver Post said he doesn’t think that just because a news organization skims the surface it makes them unethical, “I don’t like the massive media that go into wherever the story is hot, like Haiti, and then they leave in a month… But I don’t think that that is necessarily unethical, because they are still telling the story.”

Along the same lines, award-winning St. Petersburg Times photojournalist Melissa Lyttle, who has been to Haiti three times, recognizes there’s certainly a different mindset about international reporting, “I have also seen and heard about the ugly side of parachute journalism, when you just drop into a situation and both the demand and the desire from your editors to get something bigger, better and faster than your competition — it drives people to do some funny things. ” Lyttle commented.

I have witnessed what I believe to be a noticeable difference in international reporting compared to what one might see in America. I have a very small amount of experience living in Haiti and covering a few stories and issues on the ground there. One can and will argue as to whether all of these breaches can be considered unethical. Some of it is simply lazy journalism, which does indeed happen everywhere. I am baffled, however, when a person or an organization spends the money and effort to send a reporter or photographer all of that way but doesn’t then budget for anything else and they expect to get a real story out of it. Adhering to the ethical standard of telling a true and a balanced story, I can’t see how one can get a complete picture without incorporating the voice of a local. A lot of the time, for example, I noticed photographers never got the names of the people they were photographing or even tried talking to them at all. This is something that would absolutely not fly in the U.S. One situation that always stuck with me that really bothered me was in a cholera ward at St. Nicholas Hospital in Saint-Marc during the first few weeks of the outbreak. I had arrived at the hospital an hour maybe two before a pretty big group of journalists did. When I arrived, I met with the director of the hospital and made sure to get his permission to take photographs. After that I asked every single person I photographed if it was alright with them or their family members. I was able to do this because I brought a translator. When the group of journalists arrived, they looked to me like a pack of tourists unloading at the zoo. The photographers descended on the children’s ward like flies to old meat. Out of a handful I didn’t see any of them speak to their subjects but instead treated them more like objects, snapping photographs whenever and wherever they wanted.

It was really this specific experience that made me question whether I wanted to continue to pursue photojournalism. In the end I decided to stick with it because like all the amazing people I interviewed for this paper believe, it’s my responsibility to seek out the truth and report it.

Experiences like these as well as the more extreme ones help us to remember where to set our standards and the importance of being human beings as well as journalists. Steber expressed it well when she said, “You can’t keep returning just to take and be an observer. At least I cannot but there are people who would argue with this; either you are a journalist or an aide worker…I am a journalist who happens to try to help people I know and meet.”

Citations
Farmer, Paul. The Uses of Haiti. Monroe, Maine. Common Courage Press: 2003.

Kobré, Kenneth. Photojournalism: The Professionals’ Approach. 6th ed. Burlington, MA. Marie Hooper: 2008.

Hurbon, Laennec. “American Fantasy and Haitian Vodou” in Sacred Arts of Haitian Vodou. Donald J. Cosentino Ed. Los Angeles, CA. South Sea International Press Ltd: 1995.

Tuttle, Steve. “Haiti in the Time of Cholera” Newsweek. Ed. Newsweek. Nov. 11, 2010. http:// www.newsweek.com/2010/11/11/haiti-in-the-time-of-cholera.html

Clammer, Paul. “Haiti History” Dominican Republic & Haiti Lonely Planet. Singapore. Lonely Planet Publications Pty Ltd: 2008.

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