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News :: Miscellaneous |
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Cautionary Tale From A Professional Journalist |
Current rating: 0 |
by Jeremy Bigwood
(No verified email address) |
09 Jul 2001
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An excerpt of an informative article in the American Journalism Review July, 2001 issue. IMC reporters might want to take note of the issues raised in it about the potential for use of our work by government intelligence agencies. The attempted use of subpoenas to pry loose the IMC logs by the FBI and Secret Service in April is only the most obvious way to obtain info. Think of the unintended consequences when you publish to avoid regretable situations.
ML |
As I walked out of the office, I ran into an acquaintance, one of Gamma's New York photographers. He said that everyone in the agency knew the State Department representative, "a very nice woman" named Mary Beth MacDonald. The next day I met with Gamma s executive director at the New York office, Jennifer Coley. She explained that MacDonald came by every week to check out many photographers' images and send them to the State Department, and had been doing so for years. What she was doing was completely legal. Coley offered me the option to make my images off-limits to the State Department if I wished, and I did so. But even though my photos were marked "No Government Perusal or Use," MacDonald could have ignored that request because she went through the files unsupervised, said Gamma's Allen Stephens.
I returned to El Salvador in late October 1988. Over the next four months, I traveled from El Salvador to Honduras, Nicaragua and Guatemala and spoke with many fellow photographers. More than a few told me that the State Department was no different from any other client and that there was no cause for alarm. Any news about the matter would only make their already dangerous jobs even more unsafe, they argued. One American photo agency photographer based in Nicaragua told me that he already knew about the practice and that I shouldn't worry about it. "It's all just a part of doing business," he said.
But I was thoroughly disquieted by the implications. It would have been much different had I been a wire service photographer, who only sent a couple of edited images of a given event. But I was sending entire rolls of film, lots of them, that could be seen by a US. government representative before I would see them, let alone edit them. It would be the equivalent of a reporter turning over his notes.
The issue here was not that the government could view published pictures. It was the sheer mass of unedited film that concerned me. By analyzing the sequence of photographs, someone could see where I had been and whom I had talked to. This could have been dangerous for the people I had photographed. It was no secret that the same government that was analyzing my photographs was underwriting the elimination of many of the people I was photographing, often acting through proxies to do the dirty work. Had I been a poorly paid, unwitting spy?
Follow link below for the entire article: |
See also:
http://cryptome.org/bigwood.htm
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