Centerpieces

At first, the ethical challenge presented by the photo of the weeping baby in Zimbabwe centered on minimizing harm that could be caused by identifying a vulnerable subject of coverage.

Two weeks later, the focus has shifted to one of the other main pillars of ethical decision-making for journalists: accuracy.

Along the way, the handling of the story by three news organizations -- The New York Times, The Sunday Times of London and Newsweek -- has raised a range of critical issues. They include: verification of reporting from conflict zones, the challenges of working through interpreters, the seductive tug of a story's narrative and the viral nature of news in an era of Web publishing.

The story got its start on June 25 at The New York Times, where page one photo editor Meaghan Looram was surprised to discover a series of images in the incoming queue of the paper's computer system.

"I was immediately drawn to them," Looram told my colleague, Kenny Irby, in an e-mail interview June 28, "not only because images out of Zimbabwe have been so scarce, but because these particular images were so strong. I was further compelled once I read the details of the captions."

(The Times has removed the following image from its Web site. The caption below reflects the original language used on the front page of the June 26, 2008 edition.)

The New York Times Suffering Great and Small An 11-month-old boy with broken legs found shelter in a church in Harare, Zimbabwe. His mother said youths with the governing party shattered his legs while trying to make her disclose the whereabouts of her husband, an opposition supporter.

The details included the claim by the child's mother that supporters of Zimbabwean President Robert Mugabe had attacked them and broken the baby's legs by throwing him to the floor. The Times displayed the image across four columns of its front page June 26.

Because the child's mother had told the photographer that the the attackers were seeking the whereabouts of her husband, a member of the opposition, the paper tried to shield the family somewhat by withholding their names and keeping the photo off the paper's Web site.

That didn't stop the photo from spreading. Not via the Web, but the old-fashioned way: the photographer provided the photo to other publications.

LESSONS LEARNED

I see at least a half-dozen lessons, and invite readers to post others to the feedback area of this article: Ask "How do we know that?" about every assertion in every story. Attribution, as we learned in this case, can turn out to be a necessary but insufficient answer. Publishing to the Web carries risks and benefits quite different from print publications. The security risks to the baby in this case may seem obvious, but the accuracy challenge raised by the Sunday Times reader was not.   When verification is rendered uncertain by such factors as danger or working with interpreters, let readers know. Conflicting reports about such a basic element as gender gives readers plenty of reason for skepticism about the accuracy of the overall account. When we screw up something really important, why not apologize to readers? I'm familiar with lots of reasons not to do so -- potential legal liability, the subjective nature of deciding when to apologize and when not to, etc. -- but the "unreserved" apology issued by the Sunday Times has some appeal. Independence is critical (along with accuracy and minimizing harm), but it doesn't necessarily rule out helping people. As with most journalistic decisions, the starting point isn't so much yes or no as it is how. Don't forget to disclose what, if anything, you've done to help. Beware the seductive tug of a story's narrative. The photo's dramatic fit with the narrative of the Zimbabwe story, at least as I understand it, clearly seduced me. That set in motion the process that led to our initial coverage of the image. Was I sufficiently skeptical of the story behind the photo? Not by a long shot.

The Sunday Times of London published the photo on its front page and on its Web site June 29, including a first and last name for the child. From there, Huffington Post and other blogs began linking to the Sunday Times photo and story.

The Sunday Times article has attracted 161 reader comments, one from a reader identified only as "Davis (of) Manchester" who may have issued the first public challenge to the veracity of the mother's story: "... It is very unZimbabwean to harm a child. One wonders if this story is true."

In Zimbabwe, meanwhile, Newsweek correspondent Rod Nordland set out to find the baby he said he thought "could easily ... be the poster child for this entire vicious election process and the waning years of Comrade Bob." I'd had a similar reaction to the photo when it first jumped out at me from my breakfast table, reminding me of the iconic power of the 1993 photo of the starving child and the vulture from the Sudan.

In a detailed report posted to Newsweek.com July 3, Nordland described a five-day hunt for the baby and published his own photograph of mother and child. Nordland's account differed from earlier reports in several respects, beginning with casts missing from the child's legs. He also reported that the name provided by the Sunday Times was actually that of a nurse who had cared for the baby. Finally, Nordland described the child not as a boy but as a girl.

Back in London, doubts about the story were bubbling to the surface at the offices of The Sunday Times. After readers offered money for medical treatment, the paper said it decided to help.

When a Sunday Times reporter tried to arrange an operation, though, the paper reported that "an orthopaedic surgeon said an X-Ray of the child's legs showed no sign of fractures. Doctors in Harare and London said he had club feet."

The Sunday Times reported its findings in a correction published this past Sunday (July 6) that  concluded: "Our inquiries in the past few days suggest that we were wrong to report that the baby's legs had been broken in an assault. For that, we unreservedly apologise."

It wasn't until Wednesday, July 10 that The New York Times reported much the same thing in a detailed Editors' Note.

Greg Winter, an editor on the foreign desk at The New York Times, responded by e-mail to questions about steps editors took to verify information provided by the mother: 

Before publishing the picture and the article accompanying it, we held discussions about the veracity of the mother's account and determined that there were several factors suggesting that she had been telling the truth: She was discovered in a de facto shelter for refugees of political violence; she was quite visibly gaunt and afraid; there was a deluge of evidence of widespread attacks on opposition supporters around the country; she had ample information to demonstrate that her husband was, in fact, an opposition figure. These all lent credibility to her claims. Even our subsequent reporting has indicated that she and her baby were victims of an attack, though one that clearly did not lead to the injuries she described.

After our discussion about the veracity of the woman's claims, we were careful to attribute everything she claimed to her directly, since we could not independently verify her account. That is why all her descriptions of what happened to her or her baby during the attack were attributed to her, not stated as fact.

Journalists in the field must not, of course, take sides in conflicts they cover. But neither do they suspend their humanity. It's no violation of journalistic neutrality to share food with a hungry person or give an injured person a ride to a medical facility. In this case, the photographer performed an act of kindness.

As for quality control and lessons to be learnt, there are occasions when uncorroborated information is presented as fact when it should be attributed to a source. In particularly contentious areas, we usually make it clear that a claim cannot be corroborated. In retrospect, the story of the baby in Zimbabwe should have been more cautiously presented.

The motivation wasn't legal. There was and is no likelihood of any legal action arising from the error over the picture. It was a mistake, but one we took seriously. In the context of Zimbabwe it was an error that could have serious ramifications -- an inaccurate article about an attack on a child could be exploited by Mugabe sympathisers to cast doubt on reporting of genuine violence against innocents.

I think that readers appreciate it when we pick up on our own errors and correct them. Without getting too philosophical about it, they trust us and we have a duty to honour their trust. For my part, I think the standing of a paper can rise in the eyes of a reader after an error -- if the reader can see that the paper is presenting the best information/correction/apology at the earliest opportunity. Readers trust transparency.