Cherubs ponder ethical dilemmas

By David Tintner

An uncontrollable blaze consumes an apartment building.  Firefighters rush to the scene and realize two young girls are trapped in the inferno.  The girls hang from a fire escape waiting for the ladder to extend.  A firefighter stretches out his hand. The girl reaches but the fire escape snaps.  One girl dies when she hits the ground, and the other is badly injured.
A photographer is at the scene and snaps pictures of the girls falling.  Four images are taken: one as the fire escape breaks, two while they are suspended in mid-air, and one of the girls lying on the road below.

Would you print the pictures in a newspaper?

Throughout the program, cherubs came across difficult situations such as this one.  At the ethics workshop, instructors David Weissman and Jenny Hontz presented the cherubs with this scenario and asked which of the photos, if any, they would run in a newspaper. 

“I put myself in the editor’s shoes,” Alex Katz, a cherub from Massachusetts said.  “What would I do in this situation?  I tried to empathize because you’re fooling with people’s lives here.”

Weissman and Hontz did not give the students their own opinions.  “It was just a guided discussion,” Kelly Regan, a cherub from Kansas said. 

“I wouldn’t run any of the pictures,” Regan said.  “If that was my kid I wouldn’t want those pictures published.”

“I would have to run them,” Lisa Silverman, a cherub from Maryland said.  “I feel like they tell the story and it’s not the journalist’s place to decide what the readers should see.”

The cherubs also discussed how far journalists should go to get the story and where to draw the line with sources.  In the journalistic issues workshop, the instructors brought up the Scooter Libby case and whether journalists should go to jail to protect sources. 

 “There’s no right answer for ethical situations,” Austin Shapiro, a cherub from Michigan said.  “But I feel like I have a lot of background now to deal with anything that might come up.”