PressEthic

As Ernst Poulsen posted, a Danish newspaper ran a photo of a couple being gunned down on the street. The photo was taken with a camera phone by a witness, not a staff photographer.

Poulsen wonders, obviously, whether the graphic photo should have run. But he raises another point that deserves as much attention:

I fear that we're not far from the day, when someone out there will be so preoccupied with taking pictures, that they forget to call for help.

It is an increasingly common idea that a bystander will be equipped to shoot such an event (or tragedy, as the case may be), and Poulsen is right to question the acceptance of it.

“Citizen journalism” in theory is not bad - it allows more input and, as the USC Annenberg Online Journalism Review puts it, is “more informal, spirited and community-based.”

That’s fine for everyday stories that don’t put people in danger - and it did prove worthwhile even in cases where people were in danger, like the London bombings. But opening the door so widely to this idea subjects ordinary people to the guilt that journalists in disastrous events have long experienced when they cover, not intervene in, tragedy.

The men and women who are trained in the profession have a hard time separating what they do while they’re journalists from what they would have done if they weren’t. Boundaries need to be established for those eyewitnesses and innocent bystanders who now have an outlet on their newspapers’ Web sites. When they pick up their phones, it should be to call 911, not to get a story.