Gathering visual images of the 2004 tsunami: Journalists’ challenges and ethical issues

This paper tackles a relatively unaddressed area of journalistic ethics by offering insights from working journalists into the conditions they face when reporting disasters. It covers the disaster reporting context in general, but with particular emphasis on the witnessing of disaster and subsequent impact on the journalist, and the processes of collection of visual imagery for print or broadcast. This research provides a complement to the large body of output-related analysis of photojournalism, by examining the sometimes messy and traumatic circumstances of the initial gathering of photojournalistic imagery and by foregrounding the role of the journalist not as objective news conduit but as feeling human being. Arguably, no attempt to judge the ethics of photojournalism is complete without some understanding of the conditions faced by journalists at the scene of a disaster.