Mort Rosenblum, Who Stole the News?: Why We Can't Keep Up with What Happens in the World and What We Can Do About It. John Wiley and Sons, Inc. Toronto, 1993.

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Ethical questions are always there. Should a photographer save a life or just take pictures as the life slips away? Most will say they are there to reflect reality and not to change it. This was Horst Faas' answer when he leaned in close with a 21-mm wide-angle lens, for the AP, to photograph Bengalis torturing suspected traitors in 1972. The victims died. Faas and Michel Laurent, the AP colleague who was with him, won a Pulitzer Prize. They do not think they could have stopped the executions. If they could have, both said at the time, they were not sure what they would have done. Photographers and reporters are supposed to cover news, not shape it. But this can be a very tough call.

Nothing can define that set of responses that leads to a picture person's choices. One afternoon in Vietnam, Faas was in the darkroom when Nick Ut brought back film from up the road. South Vietnamese had accidently dropped napalm on civilians. The photos were compelling: a mother cradling a singed child, weeping victims, dramatic close-ups of a fireball. Horst went straight to a picture of a little girl running in panic ahead of the flames.

Correspondents tried to talk him out of it. The girl's pubic hairs were visible, and no one would print it; the photo was blurred. "This one," Faas said, ending the discussion. The picture, yet another Pulitzer winner, was the one eveyone remembers from the Vietnam War.

The issues are never clear-cut. The presence of a lens, especially on a television camera, can create the news. When Iranian hotheads besieged the U.S. embassy in Tehran, they spent most of the time hanging around in good spirits. The moment anyone raised a camera, they were a chanting, angry mob.

With competition so fierce, there is pressure to deliver, to squeeze the most from a story and get it back before anyone else. In Haiti, journalists flew into mayhem in a back corner of the island. An Italian correspondent watched as a group of photographers clustered around one victim who was battered but still alive. She tried to convince them to take him to a doctor. It was too late, they argued; he was beyond hope. But she knew that he could have been saved. Their concern was catching the flight back to dispatch their film.

Television camera crews face the same problems as photographers, with the added complications of their medium. The gear is bulkier; the demand is greater to stand there and keep shooting; and if someone does better, everyone else knows it that night when the evening newscasts are put together. As a result, competition blots out other emotions.

At dinner in Mogadishu, before the swarm hit Somalia, I overheard two cameramen talking at dinner. One was telling the other about his good luck that day. "The girl's head was half blown away," he said. "Damn, I wish I'd gotten that," the other one replied, dejected by hoping for the best on a new day. "It was all quiet when I was there." Both certainly would have preferred that such tragedies not occur. If tragedies had to occur, however, better they should be there than someone else.

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