Brian Risk’s Blog

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1.   ashley wrote:

   We discussed this photo in my ethics class back when I was a junior.

   Here’s the story:

   A photographer got to the scene of an apartment building fire. A real blazer, so the fire dept. wasn’t letting any media close to the place. So the photographer sneaks around the alleys and gets to the back of the building and sees a woman going down a fire escape with what they find out later is her nephew. So he gets it in focus and sees that the escape is wobbling pretty fierce. Almost as soon as he notices it, the whole thing snaps. He takes pictures of their fall all the way down.

   Here is the ethical deliemma. The woman died soon after. The little boy survived because he landed on his aunt. However, you’d have to make a decision about whether to run the picture before you know who survived. Do you run the story? How do you run it?

   How they did it:
   Of they pictures taken, this one is obviously the most acceptable: the moment after the fire escape broke. They ran the story as an expose on shoddy fire escapes on low-income housing.

   The piece caused an uproar. Some thought it was vulgar to show the picture, but nevertheless, laws were passed requiring better safety features (like new fire escapes, fire extinguishers, and wider fire exits) because of all the hubub the photo stirred up.

   Thursday, March 22, 2007 at 11:11 am | Permalink

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