Ethics -- What Would You Do?

There's a fine line between showing readers the brutal truth of a situation so that they understand the powerful truth of any story, and showing readers a truth so brutal that readers ignore the point you were trying to make and instead question your judgment.

I can think of no better example of this than the so-called Falling man photo, taken by an Associated Press photographer during the Sept. 11, 2001 terror attacks and published by The New York Times the next day.

This remarkable article from Esquire Magazine in 2003 offers a summation of the complex and contradictory forces at play in deciding if running the image was the absolute right thing or the incredibly wrong thing to do.

If you were an editor on Sept. 11, what would you have done? And why?

Now, let's take you out of an editor's office and put you in the field. You come across this horrific scene: a starving Ethiopian girl, abandoned and alone and weak, who be being trailed by a vulture waiting for her to die. Journalists are supposed to stay out of the things they cover. But a life is almost certainly at stake. What do you do?

In this case, the photographer took the pic, then walked away. Was that the right thing? The wrong thing?

By the way, for this pic the photographer won a Pulitzer Prize. And probably at least partly because of this pic, he soon after committed suicide.