When you’re a journalist and on assignment overseas, you’re a subject of no nation. Your only job is to report the story through the eyes of the citizens it affects.
When you’re a journalist and on assignment at home, you’re a servant to no government. Your only job is to report the story as it impacts that governmentap constituents.
Thatap how it works. In theory.
But the fact is, life isn’t always black and white. Especially not for journalists. Occasionally, we end up shoulder-to-shoulder with the people we’re covering. They might generally be perceived as good guys, like soldiers or police. Or they might be perceived as bad guys, like drug dealers or terrorists. As The Denver Post put it in an , when we combine in any way with those we cover, itap “a thin blue line.”
The issue comes up because of an incident Wednesday morning in Boulder. After searching fruitlessly all night for a man they were trying to arrest who escaped after firing four gunshots, Boulder police asked to use the helicopter that is shared by four local television stations and a radio station. They wanted to put an officer up in the air to coordinate with SWAT team members down on the ground. They already had tried to get the Denver police helicopter, then air support from the FBI, but neither worked out.
But with the help of the news organizations’ helicopter, the suspect was apprehended without incident. The fugitive — who has a long criminal history — had left a trail of blood, and the officer in the helicopter was able to spot him and direct his arrest on the ground. Residents of 6,000 nearby homes who had been notified by robocalls to “shelter in place” could relax.
However, now the news organizations can’t. Although it turns out it was actually the helicopter pilot who made the call to cooperate with the police, they are under fire.
A Denver-based correspondent for ABC News tweeted, “Journalists are not agents of law enforcement.” The chairman of the journalism department at the University of Colorado called the situation a “gray area” and told the , “We have to pay attention to the slippery slope, where one seemingly harmless lapse is deemed to be acceptable.” A CU professor of media ethics said, “Itap about being too close to your sources.”
Here’s where I think they have it wrong.
No, we are not agents of law enforcement. But I can’t count the number of times I’ve begged law enforcement — or the military in cases like earthquakes and floods — to take me and a camera crew up in their own aircraft to get a better picture of what I was covering. Which simply meant better coverage for our viewers. Anyway, no journalist in Boulder was beholden to the police; it was the other way around.
Yes, we do have to pay attention to the slippery slope. But we’re not machines who can’t keep ourselves from slipping farther, we’re human beings who make human judgments about where to start and where to stop.
And no, we don’t want to be too close to our sources. But none of that was at stake in Boulder. Because of a mutual reliance on information, police and journalists are thrown together every day of the week, whether they like it or not. If I hadn’t had relationships with some of my sources over 40 years of reporting, I wouldn’t have had half the information I got.
But here’s the best argument on the other side: many years ago, network news luminaries Peter Jennings and Mike Wallace were on a panel and were asked the following hypothetical question: If you were covering an enemy army during a war and learned of an ambush they were plotting against American soldiers, would you act as a patriot and try to warn your countrymen, or just cover it as a neutral journalist? To the disgust of other panelists, they ultimately opted to just cover it, because thatap the “higher duty” of a journalist.
On the helicopter controversy, 9News vice president of news Patti Dennis framed a journalistap duty for me this way: “There has to be a situational conversation. The role of a journalist doesn’t necessarily give you a free pass from being a good, responsible citizen.” I second that.
So critics are right to worry. But one size doesn’t fit all. Sometimes there’s harm done. Sometimes there’s not.
Greg Dobbs of Evergreen is an author, public speaker, and former foreign correspondent for ABC News.
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