REPORTER'S SCOOP PROMPTS UNEASY QUESTIONS FOR ALL
The Nation (Thailand)
08-04-1997
When American reporter Nate Thayer emerged from the hidden world of the
notorious Khmer Rouge recently, he immediately entered a grey zone where
journalistic principles and commercialism inevitably converge. Having risked
his life and made the best use of the connections he had painstakingly
built up throughout much of his career, the Far Eastern Economic Review
correspondent left the jungle in Cambodia's Anlong Veng with a dynamite
world exclusive , news and pictures of the show trial of the secretive
Pol Pot.
It is deservedly a great reward for a dedicated professional. But it is
a rich reward, too. Pictures and video footage of the ''Killing Fields"
ruler, who has not been seen by foreign journalists for 18 years, have
reportedly fetched millions of baht as news agencies, both electronic and
print, scrambled to get hold of the images.
While Thayer's right to cash in on his hard work is indisputable, some
of us are bothered by the fact that one of the cruellest and most cold-blooded
figures on earth has turned into a hot commodity.
If the photos were of a UFO, an extraterrestrial, a celebrity caught with
a lover, or a living dinosaur, selling them for Bt10 million apiece would
not spark as much controversy. When the object is a man responsible for
the deaths of millions of his compatriots and the misery of his nation,
however, troubling questions arise.
That Pol Pot's pictures sell because he has killed so many people. This
is one of the toughest and most bitter facts we have to live with in this
world of all-encompassing competition, especially among the media. It is
bizarre to think that if Cambodians had not lost so many lives, or shed
so much blood, so many tears, his photos would not have been worth nearly
so much.
Thayer's exclusive must have presented him with an ultimate professional
challenge few other journalists have gone through. On one hand he is a
correspondent whose duty is simply to tell facts to the world as they unfold,
while on the other hand he has run into what most people with even the
slightest business sense would call a gold mine.
What was Thayer thinking at the moment he took snapshots of the ailing
Pol Pot being brought out for ''trial", and later of him sitting somberly
waiting for his sentence to be passed? The journalistic part of him must
have been saying, ''I have proof the man is really still alive! And I've
found him first. This is big news. The world must know this and see this."
It must have been the ''I've found him first" thought that brought him
to the ''grey zone". In that moment, his commercial instinct would have
also been asking: ''What's wrong if I sell this? I've earned it."
Nothing is apparently wrong. He dutifully submitted the story and pictures
to the Review and then made a profit selling some photos to other agencies
which had never tried as hard, or at all, to reach Pol Pot. It would have
even looked unfair to Thayer if his Khmer Rouge pictures had not been put
under strict copyright control.
Most of all, should Thayer be criticised at all given the fact the media
is just another kind of business, and newspapers make money from selling
bad news and publicising human tragedy anyway?
That's exactly the point here. Journalists live by selling news, literally
or figuratively. They die when their reports are thrown away by editors,
and their organisations die when their news is no longer attractive.
Fierce media competition has blurred the thin line between proper commercialism
and unethical practice. Grieving relatives have been harassed. Privacy
intruded upon. Notorious criminals like serial killer Charles Sobhraj are
paid handsomely for interviews.
The lucrative Pol Pot pictures pose a new right-or-wrong question. It is
a very tough one because once we have explored all the aspects, we cannot
find anything that is really wrong, yet the feeling remains that something
is not entirely right either.