The Bang Bang Club and Journalism Ethics

A couple of semesters ago, I led a discussion group made up of young 18 and 19 year old freshman students at the University at Albany. We were reading a book that portrayed alternate versions of American history. One young man was upset every time we met. "Why can't we just read facts?" he said. "Why can't the book just say, 'Here's the way it was' and leave it at that?"

Being a good historian, I had a ready-made answer, even though it didn't wash so well with him. "Nobody is unbiased," I said. "Everybody sees reality in a different way. To really get the facts, we have to look at all perceptions; discover the assumptions, biases, and truths in those perceptions; and then discover 'the facts.' Even then, I'm not sure you can come up with a completely factual, unbiased version of history."

He didn't get it and the truth is, most of us read books without thought as to how the writers arrive at their conclusions, where they find their facts, what assumptions they operate under, what they want us to believe or think, or what facts they choose to keep hidden from their readers.

Historians, like writers and photographers, influence the way people see the world. We can prevent people from seeing truth or we can depict truth as close to reality as possible. No matter how truthful and honest, each historian presents a biased version of the truth. This is especially true when philosophical fads sweep the academic community -- presenting a "Marxist," "feminist," or any other "kind" of history is presenting a biased view. It may be naming the bias, but it is, nevertheless, a bias and might not, ultimately, be helpful as analytical tools.

Greg Marinovich and Joao Silva, South African photographers who depicted the secret war fought in South African townships during the four years between Nelson Mandela's release from prison and the first democratic elections in the country, depicted the internal struggle of presenting news -- or history -- in a biased manner in their book, "The Bang Bang Club." Though they were primarily concerned with demonstrating the personal moral struggle that occurred as they took photos of violence and death without lending a hand, they also demonstrated how snapshots, like articles and books, only show one aspect of the truth. This reality quickly caught up with one of the members of the "Bang-Bang Club," Kevin Carter.

Kevin Carter won a Pulitzer Prize in 1993 for his photo of a starving Sudanese child, stalked by a vulture a few feet away. The photo only shows the apparent imminent danger that the child is in, but fails to show how close the feeding center is or even that the vulture is not threatening the child in any way. Wherever he went, Kevin was dodged with questions about what happened to the little girl in the photo, and why he didn't help her to the feeding station after he had taken the photo, and whether she had made it at all (he didn't know).

Kevin, like the other members of the Bang-Bang Club who faced similar questions about the photos they took, began to question whether he had failed to pass some basic test of his fundamental humanity. The self-doubt, coupled with his emerging self-hatred and fear of failure after winning such an enormous prize (a fear that many writers also face after success) -- as well as the death of his colleague and best friend, Ken Oosterbroek -- led to his suicide.

One night, Kevin parked his car and rigged a hose to the tailpipe of his car. Locked inside with the windows rolled up and the noxious fumes pouring in, he wrote a goodbye letter to Joao Silva, another photographer and author of the book, "The Bang Bang Club."

In recent years, historians and writers (rightly) have come under scrutiny regarding the veracity of their words. Yes, books and pictures can be liberating. They can influence people to be compassionate, as this photo did by encouraging people to make donations for food relief to countries like the Sudan.

But like Kevin Carter, we must scrutinize how we portray reality and understand how damaging words and pictures can be, and that our responsibility does not end with writing an article or taking a picture. This does not mean there is no place for alternate perceptions, only that there should be an understanding that much of what passes for history or news is one perception, one aspect or layer to the truth, and not the whole of it.

As I have mentioned in other articles, especially "Defining Terrorism," those who control the press often control our understanding of the world we live in. We must question whether those who present truth to us - President George W. Bush, Tom Brokaw, the journalist in the bush, the historian in the ivory tower - have given us incontrovertible evidence for the reality they present. Otherwise, we dumbly accept whatever they tell us, going along with what ultimately can lead to our demise. It is not enough to assume they are human and would not wish evil on us, that they are politicians or journalists or historians, and know best. We know this is not true, otherwise the massacres in Rwanda would not have occurred in 1994; the Holocaust would be nothing but a nightmare; Stalin's murders, a vague possibility.

Those who write have a responsibility - to be as accurate as possible, to understand their biases and attempt to leave them behind. Those who read have another responsibility - to question when information seems lacking, to read with a grain of salt, and to demand the whole story.

For Further Reading:

Greg Marinovich & Joao Silva. The Bang-Bang Club: Snapshots from a Hidden War. New York: Basic Books, 2000.