How Far Do You Go?

This weekend I had the oppurtunity to see a new film called "Traitor." It has Don Cheadle from "Hotel Rwanda." I highly reccommend this film. It was a very thought provoking film for me. It had me pondering different aspects of life at different levels, from my faith, to whether or not the U.S. is like a terrorist organization in that it is willing to kill innocent people for the cause of greater good, and my future career as a journalist, among other topics....

In this film, a man becomes firmly entrenched in a role in order to accomplish "greater" things. He does things in this role that he otherwise would not do, all the while trying to convince himself that it will be worth it in the end.

In journalism there are many examples of people going to extremes to get the story and report it. To be the first, to be the best. Nellie Bly (as mentioned in class) is an example of a journalist who went to the extreme of going undercover in an insane asylum. Daniel Pearl, a journalist for The Wall Street Journal, was beheaded in Pakistan in 2002 while trying to uncover and report possible links between Al-Qaeda and Pakistan's Inter-Services Intelligence (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Pearl). In 2006 Reuters pulled 920 photographs taken by freelance photographer Adnan Hajj after it was learned that many had been "photoshopped" (see http://tiny.cc/G8Dhs).

We all want to succeed in our professions, but to what extremes? How far do you go?