To report realistically on the 48,000 Latino children who have made the lonely journey, the Times journalists followed a boy from Honduras who was trying to reach his mother. Enrique was five years old when his mother left; he was seventeen when they were reunited in North Carolina.
Nazario and Bartletti followed Enrique and other children, observing them through the majority of the trip, most notably as they rode on the tops of freight trains in Mexico. Nazario followed in Enrique’s footsteps to conduct interviews and make observations that would enable her to reconstruct parts of the journey that she did not witness.
In an article in Nieman Reports 6, Nazario defined her journalistic purpose:
to try to give an unflinching look at what this journey is like for these children and what these separations are like through one thread, through one child. I wanted to take the audience into this world, which I assume most readers would never see otherwise. I tried to bring it to them as vividly as possible so they could smell what it’s like to be on top of the train. They could feel it. They could see it. They literally would feel like they were alongside him.
Nazario knew that she would be confronted with difficult decisions about whether to continue to observe or to intervene to make the journey easier for Enrique and the other children. “You have to think these things out ahead of time,” Nazario wrote, “because things can happen so quickly that it’s too late to react in an appropriate way if you’re not prepared.” As part of the preparation, Nazario spent time at federal shelters and jails along the border, and interviewed children who had made the entire journey.
She realized that if she did intervene on Enrique’s behalf, she could not use him in the story, because her intervention would destroy the authenticity of the account of his journey. She wrote that reporters have to accept that they are going to see a lot of misery in such an assignment. This is an emotional struggle, especially when children are involved. For example, Enrique realized that he did not have a telephone number for his mother in North Carolina, so he had to work for two weeks to raise enough money to make a telephone call to Honduras to get the number. All the while, Nazario had a cell phone, which she kept out of sight. “Sometimes you need to watch that play out to be able to write a really powerful story. Those aren’t often things the public understands very well. I got some emails that basically said, ‘Aren’t you a human being? How could you do this?’”
Nazario devised a test for an intervention decision: “The dividing line was whether or not I felt the child was in imminent danger. Not discomfort, not “things are going really badly,” not “I haven’t eaten in twenty‐four hours.” … The bottom line on all this is that I try not to do anything I can’t live with.”
Riding on top of a freight train, the Times journalists shared danger with the children they were observing. Of course, the reporters had resources their subjects did not, resources they did not flaunt. Nazario wrote: “When I was on top of the train I would refrain from calling my husband until I could go to a part of the train that was empty. I would never eat in front of the kids. I would never drink water in front of the kids.”
Ultimately, the reporter did not accompany Enrique on the Rio Grande crossing. Here, ethical questions were intertwined with legal ones. “If I was with a child and was viewed as helping him across, then that would be aiding and abetting, which is a felony,” Nazario wrote. But she did think in advance of what she might do if she were in the water with Enrique: “Crossing the Rio Grande is a very dangerous challenge. Hundreds of people drown there, sucked under by whirlpools. … I was going to have an inner tube, even though I’m a former lifeguard. … If the kid’s in trouble in the water I was obviously going to help him, but short of that I was not going to help him. He would not use my inner tube because that would be altering reality, and I didn’t want to do that, if at all possible.”
In the Point of View essay accompanying this chapter, Halle Stockton of PublicSource.org describes how reporters Wendy Ruderman and Barbara Laker of the Philadelphia Daily News immediately reported to authorities in November 2013 when they suspected that a 47‐year‐old disabled man was being regularly beaten by his “caretaker.” In response to a neighbor’s tip, the reporters visited the apartment where the man lived with his presumed assailant, a 48‐year‐old woman who was the payee for his disability payments and food stamp allowance. Finding the man bruised and apparently ill, Ruderman and Laker called a state‐run hotline, and the man was relocated. The reporters followed developments in the case and published their story in January 2014.
It is instructive to compare the Philadelphia episode to the case study at the end of this chapter, “The Journalist as a Witness to Suffering.” In the Philadelphia case, the reporters notified authorities two months before publishing anything; in the Los Angeles case, involving neglected children living with adult addicts, the authorities learned of the situation when the story was published. In each case, the authorities came to the aid of the victims, and in each case, the journalists called the public’s attention to systemic problems in the social welfare system.
After taking this picture of a fugitive fleeing police, newspaper photographer Russ Dillingham tackled him at an officer’s request.
Photo by Russ Dillingham. Reprinted by permission of The Sun Journal.
The cases differ in two significant ways that could influence a journalist’s intervention decision. First, the Los Angeles Times journalists had arranged to observe life in the addicts’ homes over an extended period so that they could meticulously document the problems of children living under those conditions, and reporting the case immediately would have made it impossible to deliver that evidence to their readers. The Philadelphia Daily News reporters had made no such arrangements with the subjects of their story; acting on a citizen’s tip, they went to the apartment and determined that the evidence appeared to corroborate the tip. Second, the Philadelphia case indicated imminent danger to the victim; the children in the Los Angeles case, though horribly neglected, were not in that kind of danger.
Helping police catch a suspect
When photographer Russ Dillingham of the Lewiston (Maine) Sun Journal heard on the police radio that officers had cornered a fugitive in an apartment building, he rushed to the scene. He watched from the ground while police searched the third floor. “I’ve been doing this a long time,” the 25‐year veteran said later. “I kind of figured he’d be where the cops weren’t.”
His calculation was correct. He started taking pictures as the fugitive, Norman Thompson, leaped from the building’s balcony onto a garage roof next door. From there, Thompson jumped to the ground – “like a cat,” Dillingham remembered later.
“Tackle him, Russ! Tackle him!” Detective Sergeant Adam Higgins called down.
Dropping his camera, Dillingham chased Thompson, tackled him, and held him down until the officers could catch up. Then he retrieved his camera and photographed Thompson as he was handcuffed and taken to jail on multiple charges of automobile theft and fleeing police in high‐speed car chases. Thompson was not armed, but Dillingham hadn’t known that when he made his tackle.
Police praised Dillingham, saying they could not have made the arrest without the photographer’s help. The Sun Journal’s executive editor, Rex Rhoades, also was effusive: “We’re all very proud of Russ. He’s a stud.”7
However, in a column in News Photographer, ethics scholar Paul Martin Lester raised questions about the 2007 incident, including: What if Dillingham had been severely injured? What if the suspect had been injured and sued Dillingham? What if the suspect was innocent? What happens the next time