Explaining to Readers   

COVERAGE OF DISADVANTAGED CHILDREN has grown considerably in the last five years, and so too has the number of ethical questions related to the beat, says Cathy Trost, a former Wall Street Journal reporter who directs the Casey Journalism Center for Children and Families at the University of Maryland College of Journalism.
When faced with ethical dilemmas, Trost and others emphasize the need for news organizations to explain the rationale for their actions in a sidebar or editor's note.
It's important to take that step, says Bob Steele, ethics director at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies, ``so readers understand that due caution was taken in dealing with potential ethical land mines."
He adds, ``Every day newspapers hold other powerful institutions accountable by writing about what they do--banks, major corporations, churches. Newspapers should hold themselves and each other accountable by asking hard questions of news organizations and publishing the answers to those questions.''
When reporters feel compelled to drop their cloaks of detachment and take action, they must tell readers, says Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter Leon Dash, who chronicled underclass life for four years for the Washington Post. ``When a toddler is clearly in danger, I've crossed the line and written that I dropped the reporter's hat and intervened. If you get involved, you're obligated to tell readers you felt the need to intervene. You have to let the reader know. That's just being honest.''
Crossing lines can cause journalists unwarranted anxiety, says Alex Kotlowitz, a former Wall Street Journal reporter and author of ``There Are No Children Here,'' a critically acclaimed book about a poor, urban family. In his book, Kotlowitz acknowledges providing small amounts of financial assistance to the boys he wrote about, of using $2,000 in prize money he had won for a newspaper story on the family to bail one of them out of jail, of setting up a trust fund for the children, of sending them to private school.
``I know there are people who will say I broke my pact as a journalist to remain detached and objective. But in the end, I had to remind myself that I was dealing with children,'' he wrote in the book's afterword.
``I thought I'd come into criticism for getting too close to the kids, for crossing the line that I thought, in my earlier days, was much more rigid than I found it to be,'' he said recently. The opposite, he found, was true. ``The line we draw as reporters is not rigid. There are other ways to tell the story that would not compromise ethics.''

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