Archive for category Professionalism
Repost: Our Experiences, Our Subjects Follow Us
Posted by Kevin Moloney in Ethics, Professionalism, Uncategorized on July 20, 2012
I first published this post on the tenth anniversary of the Columbine shootings. It’s been rolling around among the knots in my stomach today, after a yet more devastating and senseless shooting in metro Denver. I am rerunning these events in my head once again.
—
April 20, 2009
Here is a professional truth:
We carry every story, good and bad, with us. It’s the result of the empathy we need to do our journalism job fully. All the good journalists I know feel their stories to the bone despite professional detachment and analytical scrutiny.
Today is the anniversary of the Columbine shooting, the story that has followed me most intensely for a decade. I write this exactly ten years after Eric and Dylan went bowling.
First, perspective.
My career has been filled with wonderful stories. I have been overwhelmed by fascination and joy, happiness and friendship. My life has been changed for the better by most of my subjects. The good has outnumbered the bad by tenfold.
I have also seen horrors beyond Columbine. I’ve tiptoed around the bodies left by drug gangs and corrupt cops in Rio, looked into the eyes of sudden widow in India, and faced the grief of the family members of the Oklahoma City bombing. I’ve listened quietly to people tell me of personal losses and fears, and I have seen the aftermath of scores of fatal crashes and deadly fires.
That’s the job.
And though we feel all these things, you would have to add up the background pain of a hundred journalists to equal that of any of the victims of an act as senseless and violent as Columbine.
Not long after the event my colleagues at the university wisely took the opportunity to discuss stress and trauma issues among journalists. It’s a valuable discussion. But at the time it smacked of too much self pity to me. By comparison to our subjects, I felt, our pain was trivial. But trivial as it may be, I now look back on how that story changed me. I have yet more empathy for the victims in any story.
For them multiply what I experience by 100.
Or 1,000.
Dr. Chris Colwell, center, the emergency physician who tended to the wounded and dying at Columbine High School immediately following last Tuesday’s shootings, stares blankly beside paramedics as the names of the thirteen victims killed in the shootings are read at a memorial service in Littleton, Colo., Sunday, April 25, 1999. The victims were eulogized by Vice President Gore, Denver Archbishop Charles Chaput, and the Rev. Franklin Graham. © Kevin Moloney, 1999
I felt the first blow of the story days after photographing the tortured faces of terrified parents and shell-shocked students. On my way out of a big public memorial service the weekend after the shooting I came across the first paramedic team on the scene. The small group stood under an umbrella at the back of the huge crowd — not in a place of honor as I would have hoped. There gazing blankly at the space above the stage were the men and women who held the dead, dying and injured.
I snapped two poorly composed frames, crumpled to my knees and sobbed for five minutes. I gathered my wits and went off to develop film and send my images to New York.
I am sure that catharsis helped me get through the next months of covering the story again and again, listening to the harrowing details from survivors and steeling myself to the growing hostility from the larger community.
That hostility is another difference from all the other stories I’ve covered. Our heavy presence, rush to deadlines and competitive streaks left a foul taste in the mouths of anyone who watched it happen. Within days the surrounding community, which had no connection to the story beyond proximity, let its discomfort with our process be known.
In a few cases we deserved it. Our behavior was terrible in spots, and all it takes is one nasty action to create a rumor, a stereotype, an expectation. But all the good and sensitive journalistic behavior I saw was trumped by the bad.
Not only was this story tough in subject matter, but we had a very tense relationship with the subjects.
All these emotions well up in me at every subsequent Columbine stop — the funerals, the shot-up school tours, the exhibition of the weapons, the ticking anniversaries. It caught me this year as I heard the father of victim Rachel Scott speak about his daughter.
The reactions vary, from a jaw clenched to soreness, to sleepless nights like last night. But my expectations of subjects have also changed.
In August 2007 I was in Price, Utah, to cover the ongoing tragedy of the collapse of the Crandall Canyon Mine. My jaw clenches now whenever I imagine covering a community struck by tragedy. I wrongly anticipate excessive resistance if not outright hostility.
I walked out of my motel room on the first morning I was on the story to find a new tire flat. I looked around it and found no nails, no holes. Rather than my assumption being that a seal or a valve had broken, I instantly jumped to the completely irrational conclusion that someone in town had taken it upon themselves to go empty a few tires in the lot of one of the journalist motels.
I was, of course, wrong. And, despite losing nine local miners and rescue workers, the community was no more difficult to interact with than any other.
Miner Bodie Allred, right, cousin of missing miner Kerry Allred, embraces a friend at the memorial viewing in Price, Utah, for Dale Ray Black, one of the rescuers killed trying to free Kerry Allred and five others in the nearby Crandall Canyon mine. © Kevin Moloney, 2007
Over all the other tragedies I’ve seen, perhaps it is because Columbine was so senseless and unexpected that it has stayed with me. Drug wars in Rio and untimely death in India can unfortunately be expected. Crashes and fires happen every day. In 1999 a school shooting in an affluent suburb with such a toll of dead and injured was not expected. Unfortunately now stories like that are just another part of the tragedy landscape.
Again, all of this reaction is trivial by comparison to the victims, or to those who have seen mountains of tragedy.
To see and hear the tales of journalists really haunted by what they have covered, watch in “Dying to Tell the Story” Don McCullin’s thousand-yard stare as he describes his war-dead subjects climbing out of his film filing cabinets at night and walking the halls of his English country home.
And listen to Paul Watson in an interview with Fresh Air’s Terry Gross describe his inner conversations with Staff Sgt. William David Cleveland, the dead man he photographed being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu.
My point is not to show obsession with my reactions to one story. It is to make clear that no matter what stories we cover, we carry them with us forever after.
Cognitive Dissonance and Photojournalism
Posted by Kevin Moloney in Digital, Economics, Ethics, Practice, Professionalism, Uncategorized on October 20, 2011
© Kevin Moloney
This is one of those terms you’ve heard before, but might not have ever gotten to fully understand. It is what it sounds like — thoughts out of tune. More particularly, it is the feeling we get when our thoughts, beliefs and morals clash with our actions. It’s that uncomfortable feeling we have after we buy something we really couldn’t afford, or do something we know we shouldn’t do.
As adaptable beings we dispatch that feeling with justifications. “I really need that new [insert toy name here] even though I ain’t got the cash, and here’s why…” Aesop had a good fable that fit this too. A fox sees some grapes hanging too high to reach. After trying to get them and failing, he struts off arguing to himself that they must not have been worth eating. It’s where the old “sour grapes” saying comes from. We are also prone to justify away the dissonance we would otherwise feel when we take a shortcut we know we should not take.
Dramatic light and color are wonderful when we find them… © Kevin Moloney
In journalism justifications like that pop up frequently to argue why something considered unethical should be seen as okay “under the circumstances.” You’ve heard them: “magazines are different from newspapers” or “the cover is an advertisement” to explain away a breach of journalism ethics. Our ethics should determine our actions, of course. But there seems to be an unending stream of ways journalists justify letting their actions determine their ethics. Neither market forces, ease nor style should trump ethics in the images we produce or how we use them. If we act like we are delivering truthful information, then we must follow through on that promise.
It happens among photojournalists more often than we might think. We pay a lot of attention to the egregious breaches of our ethics: major alterations, serious cases of reenactment or direction of what would appear to be a spontaneous moment. But as professionals who document reality we need to stay aware of how we might let convenience, competition, drive for a style or a wish for the approval of an editor or producer affect our work. This can come down to many of the mundane tasks we perform in our work, including — to pick only one example — things like toning an image.
There’s a difference between choosing a moment of perfect light and color that actually existed and fixing dull light to make it more dramatic in a photo. We like dramatic images. They attract reader interest, appeal to editors and feel satisfying to us. But isn’t the satisfaction and pride much stronger when we took the time and energy to seek out the light and color rather than pumping it up with software tools? And isn’t it simply more honest?
Our talent — the one that separates us from all the other flavors of photographer — is that we capture reality quickly and delicately and without influence. It is an incredible skill that takes great attention and effort to develop. We take pride in our ability to think and act quickly and to know the story as we are seeing it happen. We slice telling moments out of the unstoppable flow of time, and when we miss, we miss.
…but when the light is flat and color anemic, we must just watch more closely for the moment rather than inventing light that wasn’t there. © Kevin Moloney
Photography, Henri Cartier-Bresson said, is “…an immediate sketch, done with intuition, and you can’t correct it. If you have to correct it, it’s the next picture. Life is very fluid, and, well, sometimes the picture has disappeared and there’s nothing you can do. You can’t tell the person, ‘oh, please smile again, do that gesture again.’ Life is once, forever.”
Having made all that effort to catch the decisive moment without any before- or after-the-fact fixing, why would we let any overrated sense of market pressure discredit that work? Look again at Cartier-Bresson’s images in which the moment and geometry are so perfect that trivial stylistics like color and contrast don’t matter at all.
And if we look, flat light has its advantages, such as providing layer upon layer of detail. © Kevin Moloney
I am not making an excuse to shroud dull images in a cloak of ethics. Our challenge is to find the impressive image in any circumstance — no matter how colorless or flat in light — without needing to embellish it after the fact. We do that by skillfully getting to the right place at the right time to capture true storytelling images and minimizing our influence on a scene.
If any of our actions need a justification to exempt them from our core ethical standards, then those actions need to be reconsidered. It is our ethics that must determine our actions, not the converse.
###
For an entertaining and disturbing look at cognitive dissonance at work in the cable TV world, have a listen to radio producer Rebecca Hertz’ piece on how process trumped ethics in the production of a reality TV show, for NPR’s Snap Judgement. In the show segment she compares the experience of the producers and participants to the Stanford Prison Experiment of the 1970s.
The Importance of Being Present
Posted by Kevin Moloney in Practice, Professionalism, Uncategorized on October 25, 2010
A days-old portrait for the New York Times. Know your subject's story and feel it with them. © Kevin Moloney, 2010.
I was walking on a beach in northeastern Brazil several years ago, taking a few hours break from an assignment there for the New York Times. I was in the middle of a rough patch in my personal life and the stream of thoughts and imagined conversations was rolling so fast I actually forgot where I was and what I was doing.
I stopped, looked down at the sand, and watched — straining to turn off that stream of words and just see what was below my feet. I was in an amazing place, covering a wonderful story. And I was forgetting to be there and savor it.
When I let my thoughts return, it wasn’t about what was happening in my personal life. I realized that my images — whether personal or professional — were much more successful when I had been truly emotionally and personally present in the scene I was photographing.
We work in a medium that can either engage us with a subject in an intimate way or separate us from our subjects with a big mechanical device to hide behind.
There are several ways we should come out from behind that camera to be present.
That old photojournalism dictum of “250 at f/8 and be there” always applies of course. We do our jobs by getting to the scene above all other considerations.
Cattlemen's Rodeo, Okeechobee, Fla. Awareness and lack of distraction help your attention and with catching a complex moment. © Kevin Moloney, 1992.
But if we are mentally present — really seeing the subject — our compositions are better. If you are struggling to understand how Richard Kalvar constructs so many complex layers of action from a single fleeting moment or how Stephen Crowley sees amusing irony around him, then try to stop that inner narrative and just watch every corner of the frame.
We should also be present with our subjects as something of a collaborator.
It’s easy in an emotional scene to hide behind the camera and burst forth with streams of motor-driven frames as the key emotional moments reveal themselves. Those pictures can even be quite impressive. But few would say that this one-sided interaction with a subject is not predatory.
Sgt. Maj. Brenda Hoster sheds a tear as she describes her boot camp drill sergeant and how that woman influenced her life. Hoster was suing the top-ranked enlisted man in the U.S. Army for sexual harassment. After talking quietly to her about her ordeal, I feel this picture was given to me rather than taken from her. © Kevin Moloney, 1997.
I once watched an intern for a local paper bound up to within inches of a crying subject who had just learned she and her family would not be receiving government aid for health problems resulting from work in a nuclear weapons plant. His pictures certainly conveyed emotion to the paper’s readers. But all the other photographers present wanted to chase him out of the room for wrecking the intimacy we had gently tried to build with the subjects.
No matter how we would like to be flies on a wall, we never are. We are the biggest presence in the room and almost always work with tacit cooperation of subjects. When we have that cooperation and intimacy, our pictures are more true, and the subjects take away with them a sense that we were there to understand them rather than just use them.
Another days-old portrait of a generous and sympathetic subject. Ease them into the situation that intrigues you. Be aware or your own preconceptions about the person and how that may alter how the reader sees them. We are ostensibly telling their story, not ours. © Kevin Moloney, 2010.
We also need to be present to understand ourselves and what we bring to that collaboration. Our mental state matters in how we see a subject, what we understand of that person, place or event, and what about it we relate to our readers.
Though true objectivity is impossible, we gain the trust of our readers by making the best, most valiant attempt to see a subject clearly. And when I leave my own baggage at home, my subjects let me deeper into their lives.
And lastly, we work in an amazing profession that takes us into the homes, offices and lives of fascinating people, to locations most only dream of visiting, and into the rarely seen inner workings of the world. Be present and enjoy it. Put down your camera and absorb where you are or who that person in front of you is.
If you seek in your images the complexity of Cartier-Bresson or Kalvar, the emotional intimacy of Krisanne Johnson or Paolo Pellegrin, the spiritual metaphor of Kathryn Cook or Michael Ackerman, or the joy and humor of Elliot Erwitt, then be there — 250 at f/8 or not.
Remember that you are here, now, and wherever or whatever that place is, you are exceptionally lucky and you may never get back there.
On the Niger River, Mali. Savor the incredible moments this profession brings you. © Kevin Moloney, 2008.
—-
The following is a journal entry I love, from a day at the beginning of my freelance career in which I left the camera at home, stopped to breathe-in the streets of Rio de Janeiro, and just watch. I smiled at the cinematic little ballet happening in front of me, glad for a change to not be distracted by trying to photograph it:
July 14, 1995
I stood at a corner in my neighborhood of Flamengo today, leaning for a moment against one of thousands of one-meter-tall concrete obelisks that line the sidewalks here to prevent space-frustrated drivers from parking their cars in the path of the wretched pedestrians.
I watched people pass.
Around the corner a woman begged, cradling a child on a blanket while her son of perhaps four years skipped among the pedestrians asking for a “trocadinho” — a bit of change.
An ancient woman struggled across Rua Senador Vergueiro on small deformed legs. She planted the cane carefully in front of herself and pried her way across the street with it. Half-way across, the light changed against her, but she held to her lever.
Impatient horns erupted from the line of cars who waited for her to move. The other cars, view blocked, honked at a cabby who defended himself with high-fisted protests. He waved back to the impatient to signal his innocence.
A tall, chivalrous-as-only-a-gentleman-can-be, old man with polar white hair and neat yellow pants rushed out and took her arm. They walked together like they were propping each other. The moment she cleared the cabby’s path by a hair he blasted forward around her.
The chivalrous old man deposited her on the other side of the street, and took the arm of yet another elderly woman. He helped her across the street in the opposite direction and kept going with her. I thought she must be his wife until she yanked herself loose in protest and turned up another direction on the sidewalk with a huff.
The helpful gentleman raised his palms to the air, incredulous at her lack of appreciation for his great knightly aid, and followed her for a moment with his gaze before he disappeared.
The first woman he helped never looked up from her path.
Rounding the corner on the curb to step out onto the perpendicular street, she dragged herself — a small grocery sack on one arm — against the traffic again. The cars waited until they could pass her without killing her, then broke loose like greyhounds.
She changed the hand her cane was in and reached out to the fender of a parked car. Her fingers stretched out for it. The car lingered just out of her grasp.
Her stride stopped completely, and she reached forward slowly — like honey dripping from a spoon. She teetered forward on her toes, and I got ready to catch her and the 2 liter bottle of Sprite hanging in a sack on her left arm.
Four or more people let out their breath when her fingers made contact and she pried her way past the car and onto the curb.
I turned back toward the other street.
A large delivery truck came through the intersection with a blue passenger door open slightly. It moved past me. The passenger hunched out of the door releasing his half-digested lunch to the pavement in heaving foul streams. He looked up between heaves with a pained grey face.
The light changed and two directions of traffic spread the bile in plaid patterns across the pavement.
“Um trocadinho?”
Angoon, Alaska. You may never have a chance to return to the fascinating and magical places photojournalism can take you. © Kevin Moloney, 2003.
Starry-eyed in the Digital Age
Posted by Kevin Moloney in Digital, History, Practice, Professionalism, Uncategorized on June 7, 2010
Stars from a moonless and little-polluted midnight sky shine over the distinctive buttes at Monument Valley Navajo Tribal Park in southern Utah. © Kevin Moloney, 2009
There’s a spot I love to camp in Utah, on the edge of a red rock canyon miles from the nearest town. On a clear moonless night the stars are so rich that I can never sleep. I spend most of the night gazing at the curls and eddies of the Milky Way, smiling at passing satellites and listening to wind hiss off the wing feathers of diving swallows working the cliff-edge currents.
“I’ll find a deal on a clock drive,” I’d think to myself, wondering how I could photograph this amazing visual. I’d get the star-tracking device astronomers use to keep a far-off celestial object in their lens for longer than a few seconds.
Below a starry sky, light from the Glen Canyon Dam upriver glows from cliff faces on the Colorado River below the dam. © Kevin Moloney, 2010
Using film, or a digital camera only three years ago, it would have been necessary to expose for hours to get the detail I wanted. And without complex engineering the stars would all move and become the clichéd star trails in a camping photo. The clock drive would be a compromise too, as in relation the ground would move. Capturing both that sky and the canyons below it would be a daunting task.
Now camera manufacturers have reached astronomical heights in low-noise ISO, and making that photo is remarkably simple: A bright lens, ISO 1600 or so and maybe 30 seconds. In that time the stars don’t move much and the camera’s sensor seems to see into even the shadows of light cast through the atmosphere by a city a hundred miles off, or from the stars themselves. I just have to get back to that favorite spot under a new moon.
But it’s not just about stars and gimmicks. As the photographers of the last century must have felt when film reached ISO 100, “You can photograph anything now.”
ISO has become such a versatile and useful element in the equation of photography that I wish camera makers would promote the controls for it to the same level as shutter speed and aperture. I want to change it as often as I change those two.
For Harry- or Mary-DSLR-owner this means great cushion in getting that family moment onto Facebook. For a professional photojournalist, though, it is versatile power. Some of the world’s most disturbing, telling or satisfying moments happen after the sun is down, in only the smallest hints of light. What every storyteller wants are better tools with which to tell the full story.
This power was immediately put to use in the toughest places. Images of conflict and injustice in the night started appearing as fast as this generation of cameras appeared. Look, for example, at the work of Tyler Hicks and Michael Kamber. Also, while searching unsuccessfully for one image (possibly by Hicks or Kamber) I found the work of Michael Yon.
And in their latest edition, National Parks magazine filled their cover and several inside spreads with starry landscapes. The story was written by my colleague and sometime student Anne Minard.
Four-wheel-drive trucks pass the dune field of the Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve as the stars roll over on a moonlit night. With film like this, a beautiful, but different story. © Kevin Moloney, 2007
Another of the great gifts of digital photography is the perfect ability to correct color in white balance. This has been there since the first RAW files on my notoriously bad Nikon D1. (Give it a break. It was first out of the chute for truly usable digital cameras.) Film corrections took exposure-robbing filters that needed a huge investment in time and money to reach commercial perfection.
These wonderful tools are certainly helpful to amateurs too, and lately a few colleagues have admitted being nervous about them in the hands of just anyone. I suppose in days of old it was as much the technical craft of photography that separated us pros from the great un-hypo-cleared masses as anything. Only we had the know-how to correct fluorescent lights and expose at ISO 3200. But what has separated us from just anyone with a camera is the ability to tell the story well and accurately.
It’s not the tools that do the job. It’s the experience of the photographer that does.
This is a beautiful age in our art. Not only do we have almost all the power of the film world still at hand, but we have the ever expanding power of the digital world at our fingertips.
This is my ode to the digital age. Never has our toolbox been so full.
###
Thank you for being patient between posts as I teach, study and shoot. Summer is here!
Supporting Photojournalist Causes in Haiti
Posted by Kevin Moloney in Industry, Professionalism, Uncategorized on January 25, 2010
Crews of volunteers hurriedly unload donated food, beverages and clothing at a distribution site in Homestead, Fla., before an afternoon storm sets in on the heels of Hurricane Andrew. © Kevin Moloney, 1992
Haiti could be the story of the year, and scores of international photojournalists are there now, more than a week after the devastating earthquake. Their work has been powerful and has unquestionably influenced the amount of aid headed there in the aftermath.
Though some journalism about the disaster (as usual) has been an embarrassment, overall the coverage has made me proud of my profession. Those photographers will eventually leave gratified, exhausted and permanently affected by their work.
But for the rest of us who are not there I suggest we support causes and charities that matter to us as photojournalists.
Here are a few photojournalist-related favorites:
L’Hôpital de la Communauté Haïtienne is a hospital run by an aunt of photojournalists Phillippe and J.B. Diederich, and the sister-in-law of their father, journalist Bernard Diederich.
Images without Borders includes sale prints by former student Tomas van Houtryve as well as other international photojournalists who have worked with Doctors without Borders.
Another one of very great importance is Internews, an organization that trains and supports local journalists around the world. Basic support of democracy, information and the Fourth Estate does not come from international journalists who parachute into the disaster. It must come from the locals who work the streets of countries like Haiti every day. And though those parachute journalists certainly help draw attention and support from the wider world, it is local information, delivered on the spot in local languages that can save lives immediately. Help Internews help Haitian and other local journalists get back up and running on their life-or-death jobs.
Read or listen to Bob Garfield’s interview last week with Mark Frohardt, the group’s vice president for Health and Humanitarian Media, on NPR’s On the Media…
…and then send a bit of help to any of the above.
—
To my readers I apologize for the sparsity of posts of late. Jobs of shooting and teaching now matched with study of my own has my schedule thoroughly filled. I hope you’ll stay tuned for monthly posts.
A Tale of Two Worlds
Posted by Kevin Moloney in Ethics, History, Practice, Professionalism, Uncategorized on October 15, 2009
This week featured photojournalism-related news that seemed to come from two different realities. In many ways the issues and sentiments are the same — protection of privacy. But privacy is not an issue in either case. Both are about protection from criticism.
California governor Arnold Schwarzenegger signed this week a new law making it easier to sue media outlets that allegedly invade a celebrity’s privacy.
It seems our problem of making some citizens more equal than others persists. Why should Arnold and his friends be more protected from images than the rest of us? And what are they protecting? The treatment of the issue implies that celebrities (by what definition?) are being violently assaulted. Yet all the pictures usually show is a poorly dressed, anorexic or obese celeb shopping for accessory-dog food. They are not protecting their physical selves, just their well-crafted marketing image.
At the same time, new rules on journalists embedded with the military in Afghanistan prevent photographs of U.S. Soldiers killed in action. An image (linked above from News Photographer magazine) by Julie Jacobson seems to have reignited the old issue.
“Media have multiple ways to cover the war in Afghanistan and embedding is only one of the choices available. The press retains the option to report independently or as a media embed with military forces,” a Master Sgt. Clementson told the NPPA’s News Photographer magazine.
Access, where have you gone? I can’t imagine how one could be in the presence of battle without being embedded. Without those images, war coverage drifts toward “propaganda by omission.” And the price of war is hidden from the citizens who pay for it with money and lives.
Does this rule protect a soldier? The dignity of death? The family? Perhaps tangentially. But it unquestionably protects the military’s well-crafted marketing image.
I have little sympathy for celebrities, but I do have sympathy for soldiers and the risky, difficult job they perform. But, as it was once said of battlefield casualty photography (if you know the source of the quote, send it my way), images of a soldier’s death honor that death as the ultimate sacrifice.
Many argue that a block on such pictures is meant to protect the families of the victims. That is a worthy sympathy too. But that place is a funny one to draw such a line. If that holds true, should we not avoid photos of any casualty? Any disaster? Any death? Valuable coverage of the world would greatly suffer. We need to see to believe, and to understand the impact of our or others’ actions.
Two worlds under the control of marketing. In both the surface hides the reality beneath.
Picking Battles
Posted by Kevin Moloney in Ethics, Internet, Professionalism, Uncategorized on April 13, 2009
Late last week a story from the U.K. revealed a point where photojournalism balances between public service, free speech, national security and intense journalism competition.
Robert Quick, the U.K.’s most powerful counter-terrorism officer, resigned after being photographed as he stepped from a car at 10 Downing Street, holding secret documents in plain sight.
Click above for NYT story… (Steve Back/European Pressphoto Agency)
Quick was holding plans for a major anti-terrorism operation. With high-resolution digital cameras, good lenses and quick shutters it was possible to zoom into the tiny print and read the document. Britain’s tabloids ran with the information.
My first reaction was dismay at their choice. Though it happened in public, and yes, Quick was a fool for not putting the papers back in their folder, revealing the plans could needlessly cost lives. Terrorists could escape to bomb a market or subway, all thanks to press freedom.
With every freedom comes responsibility. We in the press must understand what the results of revealing information may be.
But, like all stories, the complexities are thick.
First, in a competitive field, someone was bound to publish the information and perhaps the British press felt their hand was forced. Editors have always felt the need to be first and strongest with the news, even before circulations began to wane and competition for ad sales soared. And “citizen journalism” means photos and videos by people without training and without editors land immediately on the Web. The editors of these papers (some combative tabloids, some not) may have felt they had no choice.
The Evening Standard did inform the Metropolitan Police in advance that they would publish. The revelations forced British police to immediately undertake the operation, resulting in 12 arrests. The anti-terrorism plan was not completely thwarted.
Another complication is the relationship between the press and the Metropolitan Police Service in London, which is under fire for the apparent riot-police-clubbing of a 47-year-old newspaper vendor who died of a heart attack after his reported violent encounter with a riot cop. The department seems to be skirting a proper investigation of that death. They are also implicated in the shooting death of a turnstile-hopping Brazilian immigrant in the London subways in 2005.
The public and the press may have been gunning for Quick.
Relationships between journalists and the governments they hope to keep in check are always strained. Here this was with Bush and will be with Obama. But both sides could stand to watch themselves.
If the British media and their citizen counterparts were seizing an opportunity to take down an official they found to be in their way, they succeeded. But will it help their relations with the Metropolitan Police Service? Force better internal investigations? Check the behavior of trigger- and baton-happy cops?
Odds are low. My bet is that police tape and photo positions will move further back away from subjects, access will become more limited. And rather than officials seeing the truth that Quick was an idiot for stepping into public unprepared, they will simply blame the press for Quick’s quick end.
Rather than taking down Robert Quick by revealing a flub that was only possible because of the cameras present, he would have been better forced into resignation by revealing department wrongdoing. We are a better check on the system when we “gotcha” with meaningful material.
We need to pick our battles very carefully.
Perfesser Kev 