"but it's Really Burning"

It happened right outside my window, but I didn't see the body plummet.
 "Did you see what happened?" Peter Reichard, the news editor of the student paper, The Maroon, popped into my office. "Out the window. I saw a workman fall from a nearby roof."

"What did you do?"

"I got my camera."

Charles Porter IV was sitting at his computer in Oklahoma City on Wednesday morning, April 19, when he heard an explosion. He got his camera and headed toward the smoke. He pointed his Canon EOS-A2 into the chaos and started shooting and caught a picture -- a rescue worker with a dying two-year-old in his arms -- that broke hearts all over the world.

In journalism, one person's pain is another's profession.

In 1977 Tom Curran, a young reporter for the New York Daily News, approached in a hospital waiting room the mother of a young woman in a coma who was at the point of giving birth. The woman's story would come to dominate the tabloids for days -- the New York Post referred to her as the coma mom -- and the theologians, ethicists, and medical experts would debate all aspects of the case. When Curran asked the woman's mother for an interview, she replied, "Why should I talk to you?"

Curran, a Fordham graduate, gave his best Jesuit-trained answer. "Because millions of people read the Daily News and someone who reads this story might know something that would help, that would give your daughter better care." But deep within him, Curran heard another voice that said, "Because this is a damn great story!"

While on one hand the media can close me off from my fellows (I can hide behind my newspaper on the Metro or keep CNN or MacNeil/Lehrer buzzing on my screen when a student enters my room), they are also the lens through which I can bend back the cell bars of my egoism. Yet, the editors-gatekeepers control the lever on my tear ducts. They have the power to decide whether and how I will weep for the 168 dead in Oklahoma City or the half million in Rwanda -- or both, or neither. Sob slightly or merely cough for Gina Grant, an A-student, her Harvard admission revoked because she had bashed her mother's head in. Pity Greg Louganis who had to bear the semi-secret of his sexual identity or censure him for hiding the HIV infection that might have infected fellow swimmers when he cut his head in a dive. Grant or deny the forgiving hug to former secretary of defense Robert McNamara, whose tearful face on the screen is now almost as familiar as O.J. Simpson's impassive mask.

(Indeed, the news media are sometimes most amusing when they clumsily misdirect our sympathies. A recent Washington Post story classified a new category of suffering: people who were involved in extramarital affairs whose partner in adultery had died. A Rockville Unitarian Church has founded a support group for the "other woman," though so far only one woman has joined, and mourns alone, sad and puzzled that her bereavement must remain as private as her love affair.)

Unfortunately, all the great powers the media have to put recognizable faces on strangers, to give dignity and individuality to far-away persons who might otherwise be nothing but numbers, fall silent when the military propaganda foghorn blows. I ask my students if they would be willing to have their own neighborhoods bombed or burned in order to capture an escaped convict hiding in the vicinity; but, if all men and women are truly brothers and sisters and if good journalism is that which reveals the universality in each person's predicament, the press should have put the same question to the American people in time for them to understand what was to be done in Panama, for example, in their name.

In Suffering, written in the last months of the Vietnam War, the German theologian Dorothee Soelle, moved by the bitterness and outrage of those who could not understand why their protests had not been heard, argues that communication, mastery of the language, is key to the "only . . . conceivable goal" worthy of a human being, "the abolition of circumstances under which people are forced to suffer."

She quotes at length an account by a fifty-five-year-old foundry worker whose every day is nothing but a mess of dust, smoke, soot, bodies wet and slippery with sweat stained green by copper oxide, skin burned blotchy by phosphorous, gloom, legs swollen and so painful that he wants to scream -- but he is ashamed to scream in front of his co-workers.

To relieve the pain, two things must happen: the worker has to find language to express it; he must believe that the world can be changed.

This is where the media come in. The Christian theologian, for example, knows that liturgy, prayer, and identification with Jesus's redemptive suffering are a partial answer. The journalist knows that, whatever the theological response, his moral obligation is to help that foundry worker find the language, to be his scream, a scream that takes flesh in bold headlines, pictures, text, and layout that make the story jump off the page into the reader's heart.

Recently I interviewed eight reporters, all of whom I had taught in college, on how they saw themselves as interpreters of misfortune. The Washington Post's Rene Sanchez spoke for them all: "It's the toughest thing we do. And the most important."

Many had seen the Jerry Bruck documentary on I.F. Stone, where Izzy, the old muckraker, with a mad glint in his eye, is addressing an audience of college students about the mendacity of governments and the joy of his work, and about how much fun it is to have his own little paper that allows him to spit in the eyes of all the militarists, racists, fascists, and dogmatists. It's so much fun, he says, that he feels like a cub reporter who has his own big fire to cover.

"Except," he says, "you can forget it's really burning."

That is the journalist's moral tension: one person's pain is the other's stimulation, his living. Suffering sells. Yet the journalist, insofar as he or she is a human being, must strive to alleviate suffering. Jim Dwyer, Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for the late New York Newsday, says the only ethical justification for the reporter's intrusion into the victim's life is that he will help. Dwyer's fierce compassion fueled his series on the babies who were infected with the AIDS virus but went untreated because New York State law kept the results of infants' HIV tests secret. True, these children did not have the prospect of a long life; but to this columnist, every life deserves all the dignity the community can give it. Years ago when Dwyer was covering his fire in Queens, one in which five children died, the man in the house pleaded with Dwyer not to use his name, lest the woman lose her welfare payments. Dwyer left the name out of the story; that family had suffered enough.

When reporters are not columnists they put their ethical agendas not on hold but in perspective.

Tom Puleo, of The Hartford Courant, says that any journalist with a conscience has to be an interpreter, but with a special obligation to show things the way people would not otherwise see them. He has covered the prisons in a way that would mitigate the "lock-'em-up-and-throw-away-the-key" mentality; the public should know that 60 percent of the inmates were not necessarily incorrigible and that rehab programs might turn their lives around. When a drunk driver ran down a sixteen-year-old boy holding hands with his girlfriend, the Courant's coverage portrayed both the victim and the driver as human beings. The driver was an alcoholic "basket case," but the readers should decide whether she too, because of her personal story, deserved compassion.

When The News Journal in Wilmington ran the color picture of the Oklahoma City bleeding baby and took a few protest calls and three cancellations, assistant managing editor Jerry Buckley, a former U.S. News & World Report senior writer, began looking for a way to give the story a local dimension; he called on one of his best writers, a mother with a child in day care, and gave her a page-one column, in which she compared the American tragedy to that of a friend from Beirut who had suffered a similar ordeal. For Buckley, this was a deliberate attempt to evoke emotion -- not to pander or sensationalize -- but to move his readers. Buckley articulates Gannett's policy as well as his own. Since today's newspapers are usually not the first to tell a story, they must give something more. That something can often be catharsis, the emotional release in which the community experiences and survives a terrible blow. And they report the sometimes gruesome deaths of saints and sinners, the famous and obscure alike, because everybody matters. Nobody deserves to be forgotten.

Back in New Orleans, by the way, the Maroon editor got his picture of the injured workman, whose fall had been broken by a roof, being lowered in a stretcher. He had also helped that ambulance crew rescue the man -- who lived.

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