The Reporter's Dilemma: when you're interviewing starving children, is it ethical to give them money?

• Author: Wines, Michael

I recently bought an elaborate dinner for some of my sources. If that sounds corrupt, so be it. These particular sources are stone-crushers who live in Zambia. Their lives are as miserable as any I have seen in three years covering Africa for The New York Times.

So after a few hours of interviews, I drove to a grocery store and bought about $75 worth of food: rice, cornmeal, milk, cooking oil, bread, a bag of candy. I returned and unloaded it, to undiluted pandemonium--actual dancing in the street. They were that hungry.

This sort of thing is common in less-developed parts of the world. How to respond to it is a moral dilemma that turks in the background of many interviews.

Journalists are indoctrinated with the notion that their job is to tell a story, not to influence it.

So what to do when a girt tells a story about her brother, lying emaciated on a reed mat, dying for tack of money to buy anti-AIDS drugs? Is it moral to take the story and leave when a small gift of money would keep him alive? What about the dying mother in the next hut who missed out on an interview by pure chance?

In reputable journalism, paying for information is a sin, the notion being that a source who will talk only for money is likely to say anything to earn his payment. So what to do when a penniless father asks why he should open his life free when he needs money for food? Is that so different from interviewing a Washington political consultant over a restaurant lunch on my expense account? If it is, which is more ethical?

My own code is simple: I never give people money in advance of an interview. When I am personally moved by an individual's situation, I sometimes offer...