Disir
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The longstanding debate about whether and when a reporter can intervene in a story is rekindled in the age of inequality
In the fall of 1997, the Los Angeles Times published an ambitious 6,500-word front-page feature on the lives of the children of drug addicts. It was written by a young reporter named Sonia Nazario, who was the Times urban-affairs writer. She was no stranger to the kind of journalism that pressed her hard against human suffering, beyond the codified barriers that separate source and subject. Three years earlier, while working on a similarly immersive series on childhood hunger, she watched while one family ate three hotdogs, total, for dinner.
She watched children beg their way into play dates for the promise of a meal. She watched a teacher handing out apples be thronged by more hungry students than he could feed.
She never offered help. When a photographer she was working with gave a bag of groceries to one family, Nazario felt he had crossed an ethical line. I think what was beaten into me early as a reporter was you dont intervene or change a story that youre writing about, says Nazario. As she would patiently explain to each subject at the beginning of her reporting, she was there to observe, to tell a story that alerts the public to problems and hopefully motivates others to address those problems. It is a traditional notion of objectivity that has been American journalisms defining ideal for more than a century.
But the details Nazario gathered in Orphans of Addiction, the piece on the children of addicts, were chilling. She wrote about children being slapped and sleeping on a urine- and semen-soaked mattress; a 3-year-old named Tamika Triggs cut her foot on glass and was left to tend to the wound herself. The most troubling scene, a photograph taken while Nazario was absent, showed a man brushing Triggs teeth with her HIV-positive mothers toothbrush. Her mother had left the room to deal with her bleeding gums.
Readers were understandably outraged. But instead of training their ire at the government agencies whose job it was to protect children, they went after Nazario. Hundreds of readers wrote to the Times criticizing her for not stopping the abuse; some included toothbrushes with their letters. Was winning an award so important to you that you would risk the life of a 3-year-old child to do so? wrote one. A child-welfare investigator filed a complaint with the police against Nazario. The pushback against the story was so fervent that the American Journalism Review published a piece that took Nazario to task for her failure to intervene.
The irony is that Nazarios story had real impact: Within 24 hours of its publication, child-abuse reports in Los Angeles County increased by 20 percent, and eventually rose 45 percent. The county ordered an audit of the Child Welfare Agency and reorganized its reporting hotlines. More federal and state funds were allocated to programs for addicted mothers. The story also improved the lives of the families shed profiled: The county placed Tamika Triggs in a foster home; her mother was admitted to a choice rehabilitation program. She had forced her readers to empathize and motivated agencies to actionin many ways a best-case scenario for what such journalism can accomplish. If you can put people in the middle of the misery and have them watch that misery unfold, thats often the most compelling way to write about these kinds of stories, says Nazario.
Are we journalists first? : Columbia Journalism Review
The above is a longish article. Note that I am not a journalist and that is the name of the piece.
Many journalists have no problem opining and, therefore, have no problem influencing public opinion but hands off when confronting an issue directly?
In the fall of 1997, the Los Angeles Times published an ambitious 6,500-word front-page feature on the lives of the children of drug addicts. It was written by a young reporter named Sonia Nazario, who was the Times urban-affairs writer. She was no stranger to the kind of journalism that pressed her hard against human suffering, beyond the codified barriers that separate source and subject. Three years earlier, while working on a similarly immersive series on childhood hunger, she watched while one family ate three hotdogs, total, for dinner.
She watched children beg their way into play dates for the promise of a meal. She watched a teacher handing out apples be thronged by more hungry students than he could feed.
She never offered help. When a photographer she was working with gave a bag of groceries to one family, Nazario felt he had crossed an ethical line. I think what was beaten into me early as a reporter was you dont intervene or change a story that youre writing about, says Nazario. As she would patiently explain to each subject at the beginning of her reporting, she was there to observe, to tell a story that alerts the public to problems and hopefully motivates others to address those problems. It is a traditional notion of objectivity that has been American journalisms defining ideal for more than a century.
But the details Nazario gathered in Orphans of Addiction, the piece on the children of addicts, were chilling. She wrote about children being slapped and sleeping on a urine- and semen-soaked mattress; a 3-year-old named Tamika Triggs cut her foot on glass and was left to tend to the wound herself. The most troubling scene, a photograph taken while Nazario was absent, showed a man brushing Triggs teeth with her HIV-positive mothers toothbrush. Her mother had left the room to deal with her bleeding gums.
Readers were understandably outraged. But instead of training their ire at the government agencies whose job it was to protect children, they went after Nazario. Hundreds of readers wrote to the Times criticizing her for not stopping the abuse; some included toothbrushes with their letters. Was winning an award so important to you that you would risk the life of a 3-year-old child to do so? wrote one. A child-welfare investigator filed a complaint with the police against Nazario. The pushback against the story was so fervent that the American Journalism Review published a piece that took Nazario to task for her failure to intervene.
The irony is that Nazarios story had real impact: Within 24 hours of its publication, child-abuse reports in Los Angeles County increased by 20 percent, and eventually rose 45 percent. The county ordered an audit of the Child Welfare Agency and reorganized its reporting hotlines. More federal and state funds were allocated to programs for addicted mothers. The story also improved the lives of the families shed profiled: The county placed Tamika Triggs in a foster home; her mother was admitted to a choice rehabilitation program. She had forced her readers to empathize and motivated agencies to actionin many ways a best-case scenario for what such journalism can accomplish. If you can put people in the middle of the misery and have them watch that misery unfold, thats often the most compelling way to write about these kinds of stories, says Nazario.
Are we journalists first? : Columbia Journalism Review
The above is a longish article. Note that I am not a journalist and that is the name of the piece.
Many journalists have no problem opining and, therefore, have no problem influencing public opinion but hands off when confronting an issue directly?