Alexis Fitts and Nicola Pring write about a common dilemma in reporting on poverty — whether to ease a subject's suffering: Reporters "may consider their motives clear — to focus attention on societal problems in the hopes that they will be solved. But beyond the profession, the interpretation of motives and results when a (typically white) middle-class journalist presumes to tell the story of a poor family (often black or Latino) can be something quite different."
July 8, 2014