My fellow journalists called themselves correspondents; I preferred the title of reporter. I wrote what I saw. I took no action – even an opinion is a kind of action. Graham Greene The Quiet AmericanFrom USA Today:

More reporters embrace an advocacy role
By Peter Johnson

The “social journalism” that made Oprah Winfrey an international fairy godmother is the new rage in network and cable news, and it’s expanding to other media.

Increasingly, journalists and talk-show hosts want to “own” a niche issue or problem, find ways to solve it and be associated with making this world a better place, as Winfrey has done with obesity, literacy and, most recently, education by founding a girls school in South Africa.

Experts say the competitive landscape, the need to be different and to keep eyeballs returning, is driving this trend, along with a genuine desire from some anchors and reporters to do good.

And then today from Andrew Tyndall:

ABC decided not to go to Iraq – in fact it failed to file a single story with a foreign dateline – but it did cover an Iraqi teenager’s arrival in this country. Dan Harris took A Closer Look at a boy he identified as Dan. Harris had first covered Dan at a Baghdad campus where his best friend had been shot before his eyes. That original report had inspired an ABC News-viewing benefactor to pay for a scholarship for Dan to attend Thomas College in Maine.

Harris (subscription required) cast aside conventional journalistic reserve and became personally invested in the boy’s progress. ABC News helped lobby the government to grant a rare student visa – fewer than 300 are granted to Iraqi students each year. Harris greeted the boy with long-lost hugs when he arrived at JFK Airport. And he personally escorted the new student to the snowbound campus: “We made it, dude!” Harris celebrated.

Celebration.

I remember walking once into an orphanage in one of the world’s then-great- crap-holes, where the smell of ammonia made your eyes water. No one cried. It seemed disrespectful and you were too busy holding your sleeve to your face. The kids’ clothes and bedclothes were perpetually damp from urine. There were babies and toddlers who were quite, quite quiet in that ghastly, dead way that tells you something is very wrong indeed.

The stench, and the quiet disturbing moans, couldn’t be conveyed on camera. The silence made the kids look well-behaved. To get myself off the hook I’d bought some sweets – a luxury. The staff were grateful. They weren’t paid.

My correspondent hadn’t bothered to get up in time for our little trip out. It was a pointless charity case. And so it went. We did nothing for those children. Their faces are marked in my memory like acid on a silver plate. If we could have helped just one of them…

Instead, every day we reported on the things that ripped the guts out of their country. Every day we filed pieces that made air. One day help came, and the war that killed their parents stopped.

What happened to those children? I don’t know. But I know now, as I knew then, that my job as a journalist was not to use the media to help one of them, to pluck them from hell and give them a chance. It was to tell a story that might prompt a response – action or apathy.

If ABC News wants to get into the charity business I have a bunch of friends who’d like their airtime and their viewers’ money. I work in a university department that busts its gut to let in Iraqi students, Zimbabwean students, Afghani students – name your country – with precious little financial support from anyone (email me if you want – there are plenty of bursaries we could put your name on), and that is because I now work in education, not TV journalism.

So Dan, if you want to come and join us, we’ll try and find some money to put you on faculty, but if you want to go back to your day job – reporting – the job for you and your bosses is still out there. And it’s waiting…