When does human end and journalist begin?

I posted this observation more than three years ago now, but find it relevant even more so today. The idea came from a friend posing a question about the human side of being a journalist.

Before attempting to answer, here's the entire note.

When does human end and journalist begin? This is actually a question I ponder often, and have been during my walk from the train to campus every day. I try to set up scenarios in my mind where I have to cover a catastrophic event. Will I be able to separate myself from he human tragedy in order to survive and capture the story? In my mind it is crucial that I am able to do so in order to carry the very human story back to the public. I have to stop being human in order to bring the human story to focus. At least that is what I tell myself. Is it possible?

I've always held the belief that stories should not be sanitized for the public. They need to be told in their entirety in order for society to decide what it wants for itself. If the story is presented in any way less than complete than the information available for society to make those decisions is inaccurate. I believe all aspects of combat, fire, police actions, and the like should be made available to the public. It's the only way a free society can be held accountable for the decisions made in their interests.

But, of course, people need to be there in order to bring these images to society. How does the events affect the people who cover them? When does a person in our field stop being American/White/Male/Female/Human and become and an Objective Journalist?

What is the job of a journalist when confronted with a situation where he/she is the only one who can prevent a tragedy? Getting involved would seem to be very un-journalistic. Not getting involved may be inhumane, where is the line?

When we see a picture printed in a newspaper or a moving image on a television screen there is often little thought given to how our eyes and brain work together to reconfigure what is represented before us. Reality is re-presented to us not as continuous tones, shades and tints, but as a series of dots. The image on the TV screen or on the printed page provides the illusion of continuity and wholeness--but it is not the whole.

Look closely at a newspaper image to see how the dots blend and spread into one another.

Look closely at a single frame on a TV screen placed on "pause" to see the noise that a human eye cannot notice at 24 frames per second.

In the 1880's, printers invented a process that would allow continuous tone images to be reproduced through a halftone screen. The quality of the final product depends on many things, and as the saying goes, "a picture is only as good as the paper it is printed on."

Paper quality, absorbency, PH levels of the ink and the number of dots and lines per inch are all-important factors in getting a message across.

Like the halftone screen used to reproduce images on a printed page, journalists also screen, filter, and mediate the realities of human experience.

Like the halftone screen, the reader or viewer is provided the illusion of reality and of the whole. Through the rules and conventions governing professional conduct, concepts such as objectivity, balance, fairness, accuracy, truth, credibility, and authority become ritualized and normalized.

There is sense of moral agency in how journalists gather information to tell stories about the experiences they witness. How could it be possible to separate the human from the journalist, police officer, firefighter, judge, educator, nurse, or doctor?

In order for people to perform certain roles in society they must develop a kind of halftone screen that filters feeling from reality. Journalists place themselves in harms way in the hope that some greater purpose may be achieved. The halftone screen used to construct professional codes of conduct and ethics offers the illusion that what it means to be human somehow differs from what it means to be a "professional" journalist. In the hope of serving others there is a pretense that the journalist can report without judgement and feeling.
However, how we feel, think, and act as human being comes not only from what we see with our eyes or decode with our brain, but also through how we respond to the world with our hearts. Like the halftone screening process in print, how journalism mediates our reality depends on the unseen qualities of the human beings that practice it.