This has popped up about seven times in my Twitter feed this morning … the Morgantown (West Virginia) Dominion Post removed three politicians from a photo because they were running for office. The photo had nothing to so with the campaign, it had to do with a legislative bill they had co-sponsored and the governor was signing into law.
The photographer, who works for the state and provided the photo, said, “This is beyond my comprehension.” Mine, too.
The newspaper did run a “photo illustration” credit but it’s not clear if they explained what the “illustration” was. I can understand the logic behind not running photos of people who are running for office during the “political season,” even though there’s an easy argument to make that it is now always the “political season.” But to intentionally attempt to mislead your readers is insanity. Write the story, don’t use the photo. But to digitally remove three people?
I want to make a crack about stenciling the old journalism aphorism, “If your mother says she loves you, check it out” onto newsroom walls, but so few people are actually working in newsrooms it wouldn’t make sense to do it.
Maybe we can have it embedded into the background of content management systems? Maybe have it pop up like an interstitial ad when you click publish? Because it’s happened again – Reuters picked up an amazingly dramatic image of the volcano in Iceland and – surprise! – it turns out to have been overtoned.
This isn’t the first time this has happened, and I’m sure it won’t be the last. So I ask, does it matter? Does it matter to the reader? Does it matter to the news organization?
I think the answer to both is yes. The reader needs to see the truth (or as close an approximation as we can get to it). And news organizations need to be absolutely sure that what they’re reporting is accurate. When I think about this photo, I think about the debates we used to have in the newsroom about single source stories. If we had just one person on the record, a person we didn’t know, we’d never use that information – too risky, too much of a chance of it being wrong. With more than one source, you could judge the credibility of both to decide if it was worth reporting.
But there were times we did run with a single source – because we knew the source, because it was a trusted source whose own credibility was known and on the line.
Photos coming into a newsroom need to be treated with the same level of skepticism. If you know the source – a staffer, a freelancer you’ve dealt with – you should be able to run the image. (Of course, there are lots of examples where that turned out to not be true.) But if a photo just appears in the email inbox, from an unknown source … well, I hope there’s a massive amount of discussion about it, that there is the same level of effort going into proving its authenticity as there is with a single source story.
Somehow, I doubt that’s the case. In the rush to be first and be cheap, credibility and fact checking seem to be taking the hits.
ABC News has come under fire for a two second video clip used in a story about unintended acceleration in a Toyota. While stories about problems mount, ABC News had what many would call an ethical lapse – first while shooting and then in the editing booth.
To demonstrate how the company’s cars could have acceleration problems, the news crew filmed a car that had been modified to simulate a short circuit. One of the shots they wanted was a bit of b-roll showing the tachometer (which measures engine speed) rising quickly. Because they couldn’t get a clean shot of that while the car was moving, they shot it while the car was stopped. With the emergency brake on. At zero miles per hour. And with no one wearing a seatbelt.
Here’s a little motor lesson – when an engine has no load on it, it will accelerate much faster. Sit in your own car, with it in park, and stand on the gas – the motor will rev like never before. So the clip they showed overdramatized the unintended acceleration by a huge factor.
So we can think of a couple reasons why this happened … they wanted more drama, similar to what NBC did in 1993 when they planted explosives on a pickup truck … they thought it was a similar level of acceleration … they thought no one would notice. Of course, there’s one more option – that they did not know the difference.
Deception is one thing and, to be honest, I can then lay the blame on an editor and/or producer who made the decision to make it look worse than it is. But ignorance … that may bother me even more because it goes to a core problem with journalism – sometimes, we know not of what we speak. It’s entirely possible that no one working on that story knew enough about the auto industry or how cars work to be able to ask legitimate questions – and be able to decide if the answers were credible.
How can the public trust us to get stories right if we don’t know anything about what we’re covering? The idea of fewer reporters that can cover more things makes great business sense, but it does not make journalistic sense. You have to know your subjects. Specialists are a necessary expense sometimes.
The legendary David Burnett writes about rules and how technology has changed the way photojournalists have worked over his 40 year career. How digital imaging (man, I hate that phrase) made so many of our old means seem quaint. And how, now, we have all new ethical dilemmas to obsess over.
I’m actually glad the rules exist (such as they do) for my kind of work. It’s not that I don’t have a fanciful notion now and then to blast a picture with the latest software grooviness, and see what it yields. Certainly if you’re working in the realm of commercial or strictly artistic photography, pretty much anything goes. But at times it’s tough to turn that “Honest view of what I see” button on and off. I have often, however, loved quoting Bullwinkle, who was once portrayed in a smock and beret, with a palette of paints and canvas at hand: “I paint what I see…. And THIS is what I see…” camera panning to an absolutely incomprehensible Kandinsky-like bowl of artistic mush. Well, I DO shoot what I see. But it’s what happens to those images afterwards which is changing the world of visual communication as we know it. Credibility is often lost as pictures which were cheated along the way chip away at the essential believability of every image. I guess I am over that, already. I mean, who actually believes what they see anymore?
(Emphasis mine.)
The U.S. military in Afghanistan has changed the rules which members of the media must follow when embedded with a unit. The key change is in section 14:
14. Media will not be allowed to photograph or record video of U.S. personnel killed in action.
Thoughts?
The New York Times‘ Lens blog (really, a must read at this point) has an essay up by David Hume Kennerly where he talks about a photo he shot of former Vice President Dick Cheney at home with his family preparing a dinner meal. The image was picked up by Newsweek, but two thirds of it was cropped out. Kennerly believes this radically changed the meaning of the image and damaged his credibility.
Photojournalists fight the credibility battle every day, from combating digitally faked photos to being lumped in with the paparazzi, a group of camera-carrying cretins who have no respect for anything, particularly the people they hound. In the case of my Cheney photo, Newsweek is guilty not just of blurring but of blowing up that line between tabloid-style sensationalism and honest photojournalism.
The comments, so far, are very telling as to how people think about images – they range from folks saying they believe he’s over-reacting to those who believe an image should never be cropped.
What do you think?
The Associated Press has come under a lot of fire this past week for moving an image of a mortally wounded American soldier in Afghanistan. The soldier was hit by a rocket propelled grenade in August and the wire service held the image until this past week. They were not being censored – it was their decision to hold it.
The New York Times‘ Lens blog has a good summation of the situation. I’ve been thinking about his image since first seeing it on Friday and have gone back and forth on it. My thinking, after all that ruminating, is that the AP has a responsibility to its members to provide whatever images it can – and then the member publications have a responsibility to decide what to run and what to hold back based on their individual communities.
Which is a heck of a non-decision decision on my part, isn’t it? So, had I been the photo editor at a small to mid size daily, perhaps where this soldier was from or where his unit (or others) were based, I don’t think I would run it. My decision has nothing to do with the graphic quality of the image, nor the technical problems – it’s that it isn’t a very strong photo. (That is not to say the photojournalist made any errors or mistakes here – she did everything she should have.) It does not tell me anything that happened, it does not illuminate me in some new way or give me a greater understanding of what war does to human beings. There is no context to the image – there is no cause and effect, there is only effect. And is that journalism?
And, if it is, is it a strong enough piece of journalism to overcome the quite probably negative reaction to the publication of the image? I, personally, don’t think so. And I argued for the running of images of jumpers from the World Trade Center towers in 2001 – vehemently, persistently and passionately – because I believed those images told an intensely personal story that helped shaped an incredibly impersonal series of events.
I am not taking the photojournalist, Julie Jacobson, to task here – I think she did a remarkable thing in making those (and many other) images. She should have made those photos as she did. The AP should have moved them on the wire. But I would not have lobbied for their publication in my organization. It’s not a corn flakes test for me – it’s a journalism test for me, and that image doesn’t pass it in my mind.
The Reader’s Representative Journal at the Los Angeles Times got a question from a reader pertaining to a photo they had published and suggesting they look into it.
Turns out, there’s nothing wrong with the image – it was made with a 400 mm lens and a 2x converter, which means it was shot at a focal length of 800 mm, giving the image a very large amount of compression. But the piece, and the comments that follow it, are a decent discussion of how suspicious readers are of photographs now – and should act as another warning to us that reality matters.
While many of our word colleagues are excited about the public release of the Reuters Handbook of Journalism, I wouldn’t expect many to start deviating from the more widely used Associated Press Stylebook.
For us, though, there is a very nice page on what you can and cannot do with photographs. I’m still processing a few bits of it, but it’s a pretty strong general guide and may be something used in future classes.
Uh oh … seems a photographer has been playing in Photoshop and sending the results off to the New York Times‘ Sunday magazine. I do love this quote, though, from Adam Gurno, the man who found the fakery:
When you work in computer programming … there’s a maxim in the programming world that says “all bugs are shallow to 10,000 eyes.” It means if you have something open source and you let 10,000 people look at it, they’re going to find all the little things about it.
Though I think his estimate on the number of eyes is low …
