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reporting
Using Children as Sources
Dilemmas for Journalists
By Elizabeth Stone
Elizabeth Stone, a free-lance writer who has written about children for
The New York Times and national magazines, is a professor of English,
Communication, and Media Studies at Fordham University in New York.
Today it’s the strained face of a child in Kosovo, yesterday the troubled face of a teenager in Littleton, and tomorrow – who knows? With more breaking news as well as news features in which children are sources or subjects, we are thinking harder about kids than we have since Janet Cooke returned a Pulitzer Prize because she invented an 8-year-old heroin addict named Jimmy.
That story prompted a controversy about whether reporters should intervene in the lives of endangered children. Now the debate centers on whether in the course of their work reporters themselves might harm children. "There is a new conversation going on in newsrooms after Littleton, after the wave of bomb threats across America and with the steady drumbeat of disturbing juvenile cases," says Al Tompkins, who writes about ethics for the Poynter Institute for Media Studies. "Juveniles" – commonly those under 18 – "are less off-limits to journalists than they were a decade ago. It’s time to talk about that."
Among the questions: Should journalists interview children after they’ve been involved in a tragic or traumatic event? What about when kids are witnesses to a crime or to violence or trauma? Or even charged with a crime? And how reliable are they as sources, anyhow? Adults suddenly thrust into the limelight are often unprepared for what may follow, so don’t children need even more protection in order not to jeopardize their rights to privacy, or harm themselves or others, emotionally or legally?
No research exists to guide us, but if there is any consensus, it’s that tight deadlines hardly encourage deeply considered decisions. "I don’t know that you have the luxury of nuance when you’re writing under deadline," says Lisa Belkin, a contributor to The New York Times Magazine. But in the less pressed atmosphere of writing her book, Show Me a Hero, on housing desegregation in Yonkers, New York, she chose several times to eliminate material – for example, the statement in an interview that a child featured in the book was the product of an unwanted pregnancy – that might bring unnecessarily painful knowledge to the children spoken to or spoken of.
Invariably, there is the conflict all journalists face between serving a child’s best interests and doing the best possible story. Abra Potkin, a producer for CBS’s 48 Hours who specializes in features about young people from preteen to late teen says, "In the end, I have the obligation to tell the truth, and that supersedes what may be the wish to protect." Tompkins of the Poynter Institute agrees: "We do not start with minimizing harm. We must first consider our journalistic mission." On the other hand, Anne Gudenkauf, a senior editor at National Public Radio, believes, "Our obligation to protect the children is a higher obligation than our obligation to report stories."
Legally, there are few prohibitions on using children as sources in breaking news. "The bottom line is that there is no bottom line," says Jane E. Kirtley, the executive director of the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press. "The law is constantly developing." No laws prohibit using the names, words, or images of children who have consented to be interviewed in a public space about breaking news, even without their parents’ permission.
In cases of children involved with the courts – whether the issue is about custody, abuse, divorce, or a crime – the terrain is more charted. Some court records are confidential, but reporters are free to use material that they have obtained legally. Increasingly, children who commit serious crimes are tried as adults, and when they are, journalists are free to write about them. Soon after the killings or injuries in Jonesboro, Arkansas; Pearl, Mississippi; Springfield, Oregon; Paducah, Kentucky; Littleton, Colorado; and Conyers, Georgia, everyone in America knew the names of the boys with the guns. One of them was 11.
Many news organizations and their reporters impose their own restraints. During the sixteen years he covered local news for various TV stations and the eighteen years after that he worked in national news at CNN, Earl Casey, now a CNN spokesman, developed a list of half a dozen factors to consider when deciding whether or not to interview children for breaking news. These include their age and maturity, the degree of violence involved, the child’s connection to any victims, the presence of parental permission, whether the footage is live or taped. "A five-year-old in a tornado we might interview on tape," he says of his own past practice at CNN as well as the network’s current practice. "Live? Probably not. A kid whose parent is shot? Likely not interview that child at all," regardless of age. "If the child is a witness and has information about the news event, we consider it permissible, though not preferable, to interview without parental permission. Every case is individual."
No organization stipulates an age at which a child becomes a reliable source, but when hard pressed, Casey says that for him, 14 is a kind of "unofficial breakwater" as long as maturity and the other variables are considered. Psychologist Scott Poland, president-elect of the National Emergency Assistance Team of the National Association of School Psychologists, who led crisis teams after the shootings in Littleton, Paducah, and Jonesboro, suggests 13 as a rough dividing line.
Recently, Poynter’s Tompkins posted "Guidelines for Interviewing Juveniles" on the institute’s Web site. Along with some provocative questions journalists might ask themselves, he made three explicit suggestions: kids should be given greater privacy protection than adults, TV reporters have a special burden in interviewing kids because the footage is difficult to control and edit, and journalists who have determined that parental consent is not necessary should leave a business card with the child so the parents have a way of making contact if they are opposed to the interview being used. Tompkins himself has given children his card to pass along to their parents when he thought their explanation of his conversation with them might be lacking and the parents might want to call him themselves.
Among large news organizations, CNN is unusual in the explicitness of its policy on the kinds of questions children should, or should not, be asked, and the circumstances under which they can be interviewed at all. To begin with, reporters must make sure the children are safe and away from the news scene. Reporters are further instructed to avoid a "a highly inquisitive or investigative style" and focus instead on "open-ended" questions.
CNN’s distinction between simply asking kids what they saw and putting them on the spot is crucial in situations in which children are victims. After Andrew Golden, then 11, and Mitchell Johnson, then 13, opened fire on their middle school classmates in Jonesboro, a TV reporter asked two students not only what they had seen of the boys’ earlier behavior but why they hadn’t reported it to the principal.
"To me that is where the media overstepped their boundaries, because the question suggested to the children that they did wrong by not telling," says Richard Lieberman, of the National Organization of Victims Assistance, who counseled students in Jonesboro, including the two so pointedly questioned by the reporter. "These kids were consumed with guilt and shame, more so than the others. They had been given the idea that they should’ve done something."
The damage of an accusing question may be intensified by its public airing. Says Poland, who has written of his counseling experiences in the aftermath of school shootings in Coping With Crisis: Lessons Learned: "Can you imagine – I’m 14 or 16 and you get me to admit that I knew something and didn’t do anything about it, and now the whole world knows?" For children publicly exposed in this way by the media, "There is public embarrassment, people trying to hold them responsible, guilt, and a second-guessing they will probably do for the rest of their lives."
When children have faced an experience they couldn’t escape, facing a question they can’t evade intensifies their feelings of powerlessness. "As an adult, if I go on national television to tell my story, I know what that’s going to mean," says Poland. "I understand that I’m losing my privacy and that people are going to recognize me. But I also know how to redirect a question I don’t want to answer. We need to stop putting victims and survivors on TV immediately after tragedies."
Richard Wald, a consultant and former vice president of ABC News who is now the Fred W. Friendly Professor of Media and Society at Columbia’s Graduate School of Journalism, relies on children only for their emotional responses, not for factual information. "When it comes to refugees, tornadoes, and so on, we don’t interview the child, except for the emotion. We don’t accept children as primary sources because children below 10 still have lingering fantasies. Who knows what they’ll say? And therefore you have a responsibility not to make permanent their passing words. I got smart late," he adds, explaining that he learned the limits of children’s credibility the hard way from the McMartin case of the 1980s, in which testimony of sexual abuse from California preschoolers, later discredited, left the lives of the school’s owners and staff in ruins. Subsequent research has indicated that questions themselves can help create false memories in very young children
"Kids were saying things that seemed weird and impossible," says Wald, "and like everybody else, we accepted that this was in the realm of the possible. I was disappointed in myself because of the damage those exchanges did to the kids. It made them party to a false accusation, and now they have to live with that."
One of the biggest areas of concern is how to protect children from a reporter’s own skill at eliciting information, especially when Telling All may damage the child personally, publicly, legally, or in relation to parents and peers. Many reporters have come up with strategies to protect the children they interview, especially when it’s a relationship that continues over time.
"I always made sure my notebook was out because I always wanted to remind them I was a reporter. But the truth is I spent so much time with them, I probably could’ve talked them into letting me use just about anything." So says Alex Kotlowitz of the two pre-adolescent brothers, Pharoah and Lafeyette, whom he got to know while doing an article about families living in a Chicago public housing project for The Wall Street Journal and later featured in his book, There Are No Children Here.
EEllen Pall, who tagged along with teenage students making video diaries while she was researching an article she wrote for The New York Times Education Supplement, was even more pointed in warning them against herself. "I sat down and told them explicitly, ‘I’m here as a writer for a newspaper and not as your friend although I will try and make you think I’m your friend. I’m following you hoping you’ll say something revealing, but if you do, you have the right to say Don’t print that.’"
"I don’t normally do this, but I promised them that before I sent the story to the editor I would let them know any fact about them individually that was going to appear. And they could tell me then that it was off the record.
"Kids don’t have an even playing field about this," says Pall. "I write about creative people a lot. Most of them are getting something out of the process – recognition or publicity – so they’re willing to trade off some of their control for the enhancement of their careers. But the kids weren’t going to get anything out of it that I could see."
Despite all Pall’s warnings, one teenage girl couldn’t, or wouldn’t, protect herself. "She was willing to be identified in the Times article as having had a promiscuous sexual history, and I could see that at least within the class, everyone would know it was she. She said, ‘That’s OK,’ and I said, ‘I don’t think that’s okay,’ and I didn’t use it."
Not everyone offers children the latitude Pall does. "Show kids quotes?" asks Howard Chua-Eoan, an assistant managing editor at Time. "Unless it’s a particular situation, our policy in general is not to show copy to anyone. But if we think a kid doesn’t know the implications of what he or she has said, we’ll delete it entirely, though we also do this for some subjects who are not public figures."
Abra Potkin, a producer for CBS’s 48 Hours, does not show footage to child subjects in advance, but will negotiate turning the cameras off for specific moments. For a documentary on a teenage boy going through the juvenile justice system, she obliged his wish that cameras not follow him into the institutional shower. On occasion, she will agree not to use footage that has already been shot. When minors are the subjects, she will blur their faces at a parent or guardian’s request.
At her own initiative, Dale Russakoff, a national correspondent for The Washington Post, selectively used the print equivalent of blurring after interviewing an elementary school class for her story on the closing of a large Pennsylvania steel mill and its impact on local families. Children spoke to her candidly about many things, including parental fights at home, obviously unaware of the implications. "To the extent that the boys and girls talked about their own feelings, I used that," says Russakoff. "What would upset the parents, I used but disguised. It wasn’t important to my readers to know which kid said what about her parents. It was important to show that this change had taken away the stability in their families."
What if a child wants information concealed from a parent? "I remember one story we did about how much kids today really do know about sex," says Chua-Eoan of Time. "We brought three boys in to interview – they were 11 or 12. We had the permission of their mothers, who were sitting right outside the room. The mothers didn’t want their kids’ names used, and the kids didn’t want their mothers to know who said what about sex." It all worked out, as it did for a teenager featured on 48 Hours discussing her own sexual experiences in connection with a rape charge. There was mention of one encounter the teenager wanted eliminated. "She said her parents couldn’t know about it," says Potkin, "and we respected that."
On occasion, children’s openness could create legal problems for themselves or someone close to them. Vicky Que, who covers children’s health and development for National Public Radio, once interviewed a child of 8 who told her his father used drugs, though the story she was doing had nothing to do with drugs. "I just simply sat him down and said ‘You should never tell something like that to someone like me.’ You have to advocate for the child."
Even parental consent doesn’t always eliminate Que’s role as advocate. "I once interviewed a mother and her adolescent child," recalls Que. "The mother had used marijuana thirty years ago, and her son was using it now. She told me I could use her name and her son’s. Call me stupid, but I could not bring myself to use their last names. The boy was a minor and clearly he could have gotten into trouble. My policy in this? I have to be able to sleep at night."
Children who witness a crime also may not understand that their comments to a reporter could bring legal trouble to someone else. Hunter George, now executive editor at The Birmingham News, recalls a story he oversaw at The Ledger in Lakeland, Florida. "Three teenage girls died in what appeared to be a one-car crash. We had a quote from a 15-year-old girl who said she was a witness, and it turned out there was an older youth involved, an 18-year-old who had challenged the girls to a drag race. We had a discussion about whether to use the girl’s quote, not because she was 15 but because of the significance of the remark for the 18-year-old. Our conclusion was it was a significant story, she was an eyewitness, and she was going to tell the police anyway."
Of course, there isn’t always time for discussion. So what’s a journalist to do? Al Tompkins has his own golden rule for interviewing children – "Do unto other people’s kids as you would have them do unto your kids." That’s a good solution for journalists who would be comfortable having their children approached by a reporter. But many of the journalists questioned on this subject say they would never let their child be interviewed, and the rest say any interviewing would have to be done in their presence. And yet, as Richard Wald points out, there is much to lose if we decide children should not be seen or heard. "We did a Nightline recently on Jonesboro and Littleton," he says. "The testimony of the kids in the face of tragedy was restrained and dignified and powerful. Children are entitled to make testimony and we should listen."
Which child should be heard? And under what conditions? And of what age? Overly elaborate instructions as to how to proceed in interviewing children are probably as much a mistake as no guidelines at all. The best approach is for journalists to familiarize themselves with the factors they ought to be looking at well before the next crisis comes, as it surely will.
