Glamor reserved for other media

In the post-Watergate era, many budding journalists envisioned  themselves as the next Woodward or Bernstein and looked for a scandal  around every corner. But the newspaper business, especially in a small town, is far less glamorous than that. Sometimes it can be downright hard.

In the small North Carolina town where I first worked, I was shooting the breeze with the police chief in his office one day when a call came in on the police scanner about a child being hit by a car. I drove out to the location and was greeted by a horrific scene: A 12-year-old girl lying dead by the side of the road next to her crumpled bicycle, as her grieving mother knelt over her body and wailed. Just thinking about it now puts me on the verge of tears.

I was only 22 or 23 at the time, and this was my first journalistic experience of this nature. My first reaction was to feel as if I had to throw up, but then I remembered I was a newsman and I had my camera. I was in position to get a picture that would capture the raw emotion of the scene and would certainly run on the front page.

Before I could push the shutter, though, a wave of disgust came over me. I felt like an intruder, invading the privacy of this mother and daughter no less than if I had stood outside their home and peered in the window. I took no pictures. I just stood there and watched as authorities covered the girl’s body and drove the mother away in a squad car, as she leaned her head out the window and continued wailing.

When I got back to the office, another reporter asked what had happened. When I told her about the picture I couldn’t take, she was incredulous, and said it would have been a prize-winner. I sincerely doubted she could have taken the picture, either, but that wasn’t the point. I figure that although I may have lost a little of my journalistic credibility, I preserved all of my humanity.