Last Sunday’s stories about child slavery in the cocoa fields of Ivory Coast in Africa were undoubtedly difficult for many readers.
For one woman, the front-page photo of 15-year-old Zei Mathias was particularly disturbing. Zei had escaped after being sold to a cocoa farmer, but didn’t have $15 to buy a bus ticket home. He was shown on the bench where he sleeps near a mosque in Dalao.
In a troubled voice, she left a phone message expressing her frustration at not knowing what she could do to put an end to the enslavement of children to harvest cocoa beans.
She wanted to know more about Zei.
“Please find out. Did somebody give him $15 so he could get home?” her message said. “It just seems ridiculous to me that the reporter would write about this . . . someone would take his photograph but they don’t tell us if the poor kid ever got home.
“For God’s sake, that’s one thing I could think of that we could do. Give this child some money. See that he gets home safely.”
Her question was an obvious one. So too was her solution.
Many people in the Akron Beacon Journal’s newsroom agreed with her.
“I’d buy the kid a bus ticket in a heartbeat, and give him more money besides,” food writer Jane Snow said. “Sometimes we have to remember that we’re humans, as well as reporters.”
Reporter Doug Oplinger responded in the same way.
“If in our private lives we don’t interact with real people and play a role in making this world better, we will be shallow as journalists and individuals,” he said. “We’ll miss nuances, we’ll fail to see suffering, we’ll overlook joy experienced by the people we cover.”
Reporter Thrity Umrigar said she would help Zei.
“I’d interview the kid, get all the information from him first,” she said. “Then, just before leaving, I’d slip him the money. That way, my information is still `pure.’
“I haven’t dangled money before him to influence him.
“Sometimes, in Third World countries where people deal with realities so different from ours that it’s hard to even recognize it as reality, doing nothing is an immoral stance. Objective journalism is a fabulous goal but it doesn’t feed the starving or free the enslaved.”
Journalists often are portrayed as hardhearted. But all who responded to my question were quick to say they’d hand over money.
I had to go looking for people on the other side of this debate.
Mark Braykovich, the assistant managing editor for local news, was adamant that a journalist should do nothing to help Zei.
“In doing any type of story where journalists `immerse’ themselves in a person’s life, journalists should avoid inserting themselves into that person’s life,” he said. “Journalists who don’t, end up skewing, or changing, the outcome. That is not our role.
“It may seem coldhearted, but if we accept these types of assignments we must also accept and maintain a certain distance from our subjects.”
So what did the two journalists who met Zei actually do?
They each “slipped him a few bucks.”
That answer came from Kathleen Carroll, the chief of Knight Ridder’s bureau in Washington, D.C., and the editor of the series.
She said the two journalists felt that as human beings, they could not walk away without trying to help Zei.
However, she said no one knows how Zei used the money.
She said there was “no discussion of money ahead of time,” and that Zei talked with the journalists without any expectation of being paid for an interview.
Aly Colon, a member of the ethics faculty at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies in Florida, found nothing wrong in how the journalists responded to Zei’s obvious need.
Although journalists “need to be very careful with how they get involved with the people in their story,” he said, they also are “charged with treating people as human beings.”
Because the money was slipped to Zei afterward, Colon said, he saw no unethical principle or conflict.
Braykovich, a dissenter in the Beacon Journal newsroom, still saw a problem.
He said the journalists’ actions were “messing with reality.” He argued that the front-page photo left the impression that Zei was without hope, when in reality, the journalists’ “few bucks” likely changed Zei’s condition.
But that condition — including whether Zei got home safely — remains unknown. About the only thing that is certain is that wherever Zei is, he isn’t pondering ethical nuances.
