Ferrato says editors are hesitant to publish photos like hers. "Perhaps it has to do with protecting the rights of the child. Perhaps the child isn't really old enough at 9 or 10 to say whether or not they want to be put in the public's eye. I will give them that. But at the same time I think that what's been going on for the last 10 years is the dumbing down of America. There is a great reluctance on the part of editors to tell stories which are too tough or too strong and show the realities of people's lives.

"And when you get into children's lives, editors are extremely squeamish. But they are not afraid to show children after they've done some horrible deeds, after they've killed the kids in the schoolyard. Then they'll show that picture on the cover of every newspaper in the country and on TV every night."

Ferrato says that so long as people do not see the faces of the children who are victims of abuse, "the men who did these kinds of things are able to hide. The kids were anonymous before. By showing their faces, these children gather their own kinds of strength and power from being heard and being understood about what happens to them. ... It makes people care about what is happening. I don't think it sinks into their minds for very long if they can't see it."

A full interview with Ferrato is included in the Winter 1998 issue of Nieman Reports, from which some of this material has been excerpted.

The Pose and the Disguise

During a shooting spree in New York, a killer murdered a young woman and blinded her boyfriend, who was taken to a hospital. At the hospital, a reporter for a New York TV station prevails on the young man's father to give him a photo of the victim. As the father starts to hand over the photo, a doctor puts his hand over it and says, "That won't be necessary." The reporter leaves the room, and outside the doctor walks over to the reporter and says, "Sorry mate, that was professional, not personal." The man in a doctor's gown is Steve Dunleavy, a reporter for the New York Post.

History

Deception has had a long and, until recently, an honorable journalistic history. In 1886, a young and ambitious reporter who called herself Nellie Bly feigned insanity to enter a mental hospital. This enabled her to expose inhuman conditions in the hospital. A century later, a reporter from The Washington Post gained admission to St. Elizabeth's, a federal hospital in Washington, D.C., with the same ruse.

Early in this textbook, we saw how a reporter posed as a pregnant woman in order to expose an abortion mill. One of the most revealing and dramatic books about life for blacks in the South, Black Like Me, was written by a white man who darkened his skin to pass as a black.

Reporters have disguised themselves as priests and police officers, as doctors and distraught relatives to get stories. Some of the great coups in journalism have come through deception. Although many of the questionable methods are used for laudable end—usually the exposure of corruption—questions have been raised about their use.

Is there a dividing line we can locate between permissible deception and irresponsible impersonation? Is the line located where an adversary press checks power to serve the legitimate public interest?

If we use life as the referent for testing the moral validity of actions, then posing to gain access to health clinics is morally defensible because lives are involved. But the adoption of poses for routine stories would appear unjustified. The reporter who disguises himself as a health seeker to gain access to the tent of a faith healer may have greater claim to moral justification than does the reporter who poses as a customer to expose a garage that overcharges.

A Philosopher's Guidelines

One of the time-tested guides to behavior is Immanuel Kant's categorical imperative: "Act as if the maxim from which you act were to become through your will a universal law of nature."

Kant had another imperative: "So act as to treat humanity, whether in your own person or that of another, in every case as an end in itself, never as a means." The imperatives of Kant, a major figure in the history of philosophy, may appear old-fashioned at first glance, but his prescriptions can help resolve some of the sticky moral questions journalists face.

In a sense, people are always means to the journalist's end, which is the news story. Even when deception is not used, the reporter maneuvers and manipulates sources to his or her end. The reporter justifies this on the ground that such actions serve useful purposes, even for the source, because the individual is a member of society that is being served by the reporter.

Dishonesty

Trust is essential to the practice of journalism. Editors trust that their reporters' work is their own, that it is not filched from another's work. Editors trust that the work is a faithful reproduction of reality, that it is not invented. In turn, the public trusts that what it is reading, hearing and seeing in the media is a truthful account.

But in recent years, that trust has eroded as plagiarism and fabrication have increased. Editors are more wary than ever, and the public is suspicious.

Plagiarism

"... Something new, it seems, is happening at J-schools. Many aspiring reporters simply don't think of plagiarism as a sin."— Editor & Publisher

Nor do reporters in Baltimore, Boston, Detroit, Indianapolis, New York, Philadelphia, San Jose, St. Louis and elsewhere. Reporters on these newspapers have taken paragraphs and whole stories and columns from the work of other journalists. A California reporter ran a complete Art Buchwald column as his own. The editorial page editor of the Chicago Sun-Times plagiarized material from The Washington Post. The Sacramento Bee television critic lifted material from The Orlando Sentinel and was forced to resign.

Few of these thefts approached the daring—and stupidity—of a student at the Graduate School of Journalism at Columbia University, who was assigned to interview any well-known person of his choice. The student consulted his computer to find an interview sufficiently old enough to defuse suspicion and discovered one with a New York theater producer. He turned it in as his own work. Unfortunately, the student had scrolled too far down. Had he looked for more recent entries, he would have learned that the producer had collapsed and died two years later.

Fabrication

Sometimes, reality isn't enough and reporters decide to invent—to fabricate—people, incidents, whole scenarios. They violate what John Hersey, the long-time New Yorker writer, described as the "one sacred rule of journalism: The writer must not invent."

Hersey said the journalist is issued a license whose legend reads:

None of this was made up.

He went on to say that the ethics of journalism "must be based on the simple truth that every journalist knows the difference between the distortion that comes from subtracting observed data and the distortion that comes from adding invented data."

Jimmy's World

The most notorious "invented data" in the last 25 years was conceived by a Washington Post reporter. Janet Cooke wrote a story about a young heroin addict that was so moving it won a Pulitzer Prize.

Here is the way Cooke's story began:

Jimmy is 8 years old and a third generation heroin addict, a precocious little boy with sandy hair, velvety brown eyes and needle marks freckling the baby-smooth skin of his thin brown arms.

He nestles in a large, beige reclining chair in the living room of his comfortably furnished home in Southeast Washington. There is an almost cherubic expression on his small, round face as he talks about life—clothes, money, the Baltimore Orioles and heroin. He has been an addict since the age of 5.

His hands are clasped behind his head, fancy running shoes adorn his feet and a striped Izod T-shirt hangs over his thin frame. "Bad, ain't it," he boasts to a reporter visiting recently. "I got me six of these."

When the fabrication was exposed, the Pulitzer Prize was returned by the Post and Cooke was fired.

Other Fabrications

The Globe's Columnist

When she was asked about why the newspaper could not locate the people she quoted in her columns, Patricia Smith of The Boston Globe replied, "The type of people I speak to don't have phone numbers or addresses."

For a while, the newspaper put its questions aside. But in a story about a cancer victim identified only by a middle name, an assistant managing editor and some reporters found the quotes too smooth, too perfect. This led to a further check and Smith admitted inventing people in four columns. She was asked to resign.

Further checks showed that more than 50 columns may have included fabricated people and events.

The New Republic's Reporter

For three years, The New Republic published articles by a brilliant young writer the magazine described as having "a flair for keen observation and colorful anecdotes." After reporters on the Forbes Digital Tool Web site said they could not confirm any of the material in a piece he had written, the magazine checked. "The whole article was made up of whole cloth," it reported. Further checking determined that the reporter had invented all or parts of 27 articles he wrote for The New Republic and other magazines.

Defense

In their defense, some of these inventive reporters argue that their work should be judged as creative writing—perhaps imaginative in the details but truthful in overall meaning.

They say they should be given poetic license. As John Hersey pointed out a few paragraphs back, journalism issues no such license.

Still, the attraction of telling a story well lures some reporters.

Everyone who tries to capture meaning—whether on paper, on film, on canvas or in spoken words—inevitably is attracted to the means of conveying ideas. Thus, the writer works on writing skills, the television journalist sharpens techniques of picture taking. Without skill, without a highly honed technique, the reporter may not convey a message with the desired impact.

But style and technique can be fatally attractive. Too often, the means overwhelm the ends. "In television, coverage—the ability to converge on an event and transmit pictures of the scene itself—has largely replaced reporting, the attempt to reconstruct, interpret and understand what is happening," says Lawrence K. Grossman, former president of NBC News.

For print journalists, the message from seminars, institutes and publications over the past few years is clear. Improve your writing.

Writing and related techniques are important, but they are not what journalism is about. Journalism uses style to develop content; substance is the center of our work.

The possible conflict between style and truth was understood by Leo Tolstoy, the Russian writer:

The aesthetic and the ethical are two arms of one lever; to the extent to which one side becomes longer and heavier, the other side becomes shorter and lighter. As soon as a man loses his moral sense, he becomes particularly responsive to the aesthetic.

When journalists talk about what they do, they call it "reporting"; and when they describe themselves, they use the word "reporters." The journalist's moral responsibility is to report, and it is in this sphere that his or her major efforts are directed. The journalist cannot see the world clearly without constant replenishment of his or her knowledge of that world, and it is in this area that major work is to be done. Content and substance, not style and technique, are the focus.

As the writer John Gardner said, "The truth of what you say is what really matters, and the only importance of technique is that when you say it badly you haven't said it."