The Interview

In what will be a brief interlude in the (thankfully) short series entitled "What Groanin' Jock Did On Holiday", I'm going to take part in a meme that I first encountered over at Ole Blue The Heretic's blog.

Basically, it takes the form of an interview, with the last person on the chain picking five questions. So, here are Ole Blue's questions and my answers:

1. If you could control your destiny, what would your destiny be? To live a long(ish) life in good health with my family and good friends and that, when the end comes, that it be quick and painless.

2. What is it about your life that you love? Living happily with my wife in our wonderful house and knowing how lucky I am to live where I do and in the style that I do.

3. What experience made you most humble? Travelling around South East Asia made me realise just how well off we are in the west. In Vietnam, we met children and made their day by stopping to talk to them and play football with them. In Thailand, we spent a few days trekking through the jungle north of Chiang Mai, where girls are expected to be pregnant with their second child by the time they are 17. It made me realise that, in comparison, we were just spoilt rich kids unwilling to grow up, having a great time touring countries far less wealthy than our own.

4. Where do you wish you could be right now? I'm tempted to say in bed, as it's only 8.15am and I'm in the office and still feeling the strain after playing football last night. But in the grander scheme of things, the one place I've visited that I love most is New York City, and more specifically Central Park. If I could pick somewhere I haven't been, I'd be tempted to say Tokyo.

5. If you were a child again what would you want to do the most? Enjoy the freedom of the summer holidays - a seemingly unfillable seven-week period that can be devoted almost entirely to playing football.

If anyone would like to be interviwed, here's how to keep the meme going:

Leave me a comment saying "Interview me." I will respond by asking you five questions. I get to pick the questions. You will update your weblog with the answers to the questions, and let me know that you answered. If you don't have a blog, but would still like to play, I can send you the questions, and you can answer them in the comments. You will include this explanation and an offer to interview someone else in the same post. When others comment asking to be interviewed, you will ask them five questions.

Publish and be damned

Today's post has a conscience. The text underneath the photograph to the left makes for harrowing reading.

I was sent the photograph by email yesterday. I'd heard the story of Kevin Carter in the past, firstly through the Manic Street Preachers song of the same name.

But until yesterday, I'd never seen, nor especially wanted to see, the photograph.

However, when I saw it, it was hammered home just WHY Carter ended up taking his own life - how could anyone live with themselves having recorded that image, knowing they could have done something to save the child?

In an archive interview shortly after the image was published, Carter said: "My first instinct was to make the picture. After the child moved on, I felt completely devastated."

Such was the outpouring of interest in the child that after the photo ran, the New York Times was forced to run an editor's note to say that though Carter saw the emaciated girl resume her journey to the feeding center "it is not known whether she reached the center."

Carter said he chased away the vulture. Afterwards, he told an interviewer, he sat under a tree for a long time, "smoking cigarettes and crying". His father said: "Kevin always carried around the horror of the work he did."

As a journalist, this issue intrigues me; at what point should one's duty as an employee be superceded by one's duty as a human being?

Carter's photograph brought him the highest recognition in his field, but it also brought him unimaginable misery and in the end cost him his life.

So where do we draw the line? Was the New York Times right to publish the photograph? Or did it cross a line that should never have been crossed?

The old rhetoric of 'publish and be damned' still seems to hold fast. But should it?

Personally, I don't think I would have been able to take the photograph that Carter did, nor leave the girl to crawl onwards towards her potential saviours. But in different circumstances, such as the hanging of Saddam Hussain, I would probably have been primed and ready to capture the image.

Which I suppose means that in all situations, the person involved must weigh up their own thoughts on the issue and make the decision that sits best with them. Kevin Carter made that choice.