Priorities

In his 2006 book Letters To A Young Journalist, Samuel G. Freedman said this:

If you can't be a person, then you'll ultimately be less of a journalist.

The story of two prize-winning photographs and the men who took them goes right to my point. If you've studied the Vietnam War, you've probably come across a photograph of a Vietnamese girl running naked and howling down a road, the victim of a napalm attack by U.S. troops. That single searing image played no small part in deepening opposition in the United States to the war, and it also won the Pulitzer Prize for the photojournalist Nick Ut of Associated Press. What very few people knew was that after Ut finished photographing the girl, Phan Thi Kim Phuc, he brought her onto a minibus, ordered it to a hospital, and pleaded with doctors to attend her right away. Only after Kim Phuc was on the operating table did Ut head to the AP bureau to deliver his film. Twenty-eight years later, in a ceremony before the Queen of England, Kim Phuc said of Ut, "He saved my life." I would add that he also saved his own soul.

The other photo came out of the Sudanese famine in 1993. It caught an emaciated toddler at the moment she collapsed while struggling to reach a feeding station; in the background perched a vulture. Like Nick Ut, Kevin Carter, the freelancer who took the photo, helped to galvanize public opinion with the image. As much as any other single factor, it led President Bill Clinton to deploy the U.S. military on a humanitarian mission in the region. Again like Nick Ut, Carter was honored with the Pulitzer Prize. Unlike Ut, though, he did not intercede to save the subject of his photo. One of Carter's frequent comrades, David Beresford of the British newspaper the Guardian, recalled asking him, "What did you do with the baby?" Carter replied, "Nothing, there were thousands of them." (At other times, Carter did say he chased away the vulture and that he cried for hours after taking the photo.) Less than four months after winning the Pulitzer, Carter committed suicide. You can never know the exact thinking of anyone who kills himself or herself, but in the aftermath many of Carter's former colleagues kept thinking about the day he let the journalist in him crowd out the human being.

(...)

I bring this up now because I had a dilemma today. I was interviewing a woman whose finger had been bitten off by a dog. She needed to go back to the hospital to get her bandages changed, and she couldn't drive, and she didn't have and family or friends around to drive her. So she asked the closest person: me. I'd like to say that I gave her the ride without hesitation. But I have to admit I called my editor about it. There was some discussion about the implications of all this, and a powwow between editors, and I got permission a few minutes later. I dropped her off at the hospital, and she got the care she needed. She called me later to say thanks. It may also be worth noting that I got the best quote of the story while she was riding shotgun. I stopped at a red light, grabbed my notebook from the back seat and scribbled it down, asking her to warn me when the light turned green.

So. As journalists, we all have stories like this one. I'd like to read yours. The moment being a journalist made you feel the best about being a person? The worst? Has anyone actually developed a firm policy on which comes first, and when?