You’re a TV correspondent on the scene in Haiti, reporting on the devastation following the Jan. 12 earthquake. But you’re also a doctor in the place where there’s an intense need for people to treat the injured. How do you keep the normally distinct roles of doctor and journalist separate?
The biggest broadcast networks and CNN all have doctor-journalists on the ground in Haiti who have ended up providing emergency care in addition to performing reporting duties, the Los Angeles Times and the Washington Post report. Their medical rounds have included splinting bones, helping deliver babies and performing operations.
Reporters usually try to avoid becoming part of the story they’re covering and most journo-docs told the papers they didn’t plan to be aid givers. “I don’t think our intention is to ever make the story about myself,” CNNs Sanjay Gupta, who performed surgery aboard the aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson to aid a girl with a skull fracture, told the Times. (That operation is shown in the picture at right; Gupta is third from the left.)
Other medical correspondents echo the sentiment. “Five days after the quake, a nun at a charity said to me, ‘We need you,’” CBS’s Jennifer Ashton told the WaPo. “I came to the decision that I am first and foremost a physician.”
Bob Steele, journalism values scholar at the Poynter Institute and journalism professor at DePauw University, told the Times that “news organizations at some point appear to be capitalizing for promotional reasons on the intervention by journalists.” See here for more such concerns.
Richard Besser, a former doc affiliated with the CDC who joined ABC four months ago, says the Hippocratic oath requires docs to help when there is need is there but he wants to avoid participating as much as possible. “My primary role is to report on the public-health consequences of this earthquake,” he told the Post.
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