I’ve been thinking a lot this year about the moral responsibilities that go hand in hand with picking up a camera, an audio recorder or indeed a pen and paper with the intention of telling other people’s stories.

I like to think I do my job for the right reasons, but it’s healthy I think to question oneself. I’m certain that many journalists cover certain gritty issues – like war and poverty for example – with the wrong intentions (although who I am to judge).

Since coming more into contact with the photography/photojournalism world over the past year I can’t help but think a certain glamourisation of the dark side of life is far, far more prevalent among them than it is with writers.

It makes me wonder to what end are we telling people’s stories – is it to add powerful pictures to a portfolio, to have stories to tell down the pub, or out of some rubber-necking kind of voyeurism. Maybe I’m being unfair, possibly not.

I like to think I do it to shine a light on certain undercovered issues, and to give a voice to groups who often tend to have other – often misinformed – people speaking for them.

Anyway, a concern that goes hand in hand with this is the fear of becoming desensitised to people’s suffering, to people’s ill luck, to the tales of abuse or sight of lives destroyed, of violence, tears and pain. Surely it’s natural that a mind closes itself off to such sights, to such tales, as a way of self-preservation.

An extreme and perhaps ridiculous thing to preoccupy someone who doesn’t work in war zones, admittedly, but I do tend to think problems around from all angles and to the Nth degree.

Anyway, maybe that’s why this wonderful clip from the show This American Life resonated with me so much. I saw it a couple of months back, lost the link and then took ages to seek it out again (I couldn’t even remember the programme’s name).