One Hundredth of a Second (Reflection)

            The “One Hundredth of a Second” is a film that serves as an eye opener to the nature and reality of our job as journalist. The film caters the battle between career and life, and clash between heart and mind. We are also given a chance to make our own stand, and weigh everything. The main question to ponder will be, chance or choice?

            If I were in Kate’s shoes, I would choose to cease the gunman from shooting the girl. I am a human being blessed with innate moral conscience and I intend to act like one. My career or job as a journalist is not an excuse to be insouciant with the indispensable gift that the girl and I have in common ― LIFE.

            I am not God who can bring back someone to life but I am a man who can afford to miss that achievement in my career and wait for greater achievements to come. It’s not the career that I have lost, but the life that I saved that counts.

            On the other hand, the National Press Photographers Association (NPPA)  fifth standard in the Code of Ethics states that while photographing subjects do not intentionally contribute to, alter, or seek to alter or influence events.

Others may say that it is merely a chunk of the pineapple job of a photojournalist to take photos; however, it will be a selfish kind of service. If you let that gunman kill the girl, then you are no different from him. You may not be his comrade, but the fact that you have attested that the girl is in plight, and you can already foresee the palpable aftermath, yet you choose to be blind and play like Pontius Pilate afterwards, still you’re just like him. The man could kill the girl through his gun and you could kill the girl through your cam.

Conscience has nothing to do as lawgiver or judge; but is a witness against me if I do wrong, and which approves if I do right. To act against conscience is to act against reason and God's Law according to Arthur Phelps.

            Moreover, it is stated in the ninth element of journalism that in order for a journalist to fulfill his or her duty of providing the people with the information they need to be free and self-governing, its practitioners must be allowed to exercise their personal conscience.

            Ergo, I still did my job as a journalist albeit I chose to save the girl.

            Let me end this by sharing James Nachtwey’s thoughts about his job and experience as a photojournalist and war photographer, “the worst thing to feel that as a photographer I am benefiting from someone else’s tragedy. This idea haunts me. It’s something I have reckon with every day because I know that if ever allowed genuine compassion to be overtaken by personal ambition, I will have sold my soul. The only way I can justify my role is to have respect for the other person’s predicament. The extent to which I do that is the extent to which I become accepted by the other; and to that extent, I can accept myself.”