Should+the+Press+Be+Human

Should the Press Be Human？

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．

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.

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.

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 Easy 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-for the same thing done by those they like.

But it leaves out a lot. " My complaint 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!"

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.

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 tort urer? I think there is, … 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 men, 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.

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.