Where ethics mingle

Finding two posts about ethics in one day isn’t strange. Ethics is a big part of the continuing discussion about journalism, especially among journalists. What is interesting about the two is that they come from two different stances, although both involve imagery.

At In the Circle, Angela Grant considers the question if it’s ethical, when shooting a live concert…

…to roll the tape through an entire song, then during the next song to collect a series of crowd reaction shots. Then in editing, to edit the crowd shots from Song B into the audio of song A.

Her conclusion:

If the crowd is reacting the same to both songs, then shots from either one would still accurately represent what happened.

If the reaction from the second song was a lot different from the first one, then I probably wouldn’t want to use it because it wouldn’t accurately represent what happened.

Basically when you choose the shots you’re telling your viewer: I was there and this is what it looked like. As long as that’s true (i.e. crowd shot from song B DOES look like what you saw from the crowd in Song A) then I personally would not have any ethical dilemmas.

She’s back up in the comments by Stewart Pittman (author of the excellent Lenslinger blog).

Time compression and cutaway placement is an intricate part of the editing process. Using these tactics to misconstrue situations is wrong. Using them to move the story forward isn’t.

Creating illusion is an acceptable part of video ethics (linking crowd reaction from one song to the performance of another; the reshooting of the reporter asking questions of or reacting to the subject of an interview, etc.). We can call these “tricks,” but they are most often used to honestly reflect reality and tell the story.

A very different ethical reality exists for still photographers, and that’s the subject of Dennis Dunleavy’s Ethics and Public Faith in Journalism Takes a Hit, Again. Dennis uses the latest case of manipulated photos — photojournalist Allan Detrich no longer employed by the Toledo Blade after removing a pair of legs from beneath a banner in a team photo (and perhaps more), to examine the effect of such “lies” on public faith in journalism. He writes:

The act of altering an image to correct a deficiency may seem innocent enough on the surface, but deeper down the shift from fact to fiction signifies a moral choice that is informed by either ignorance or duplicity. Regardless of motive or rationale, Detrich’s case should remind us that journalists function to serve the public good through a series of professional and societal expectations and obligations that are imposed upon them.

We demand of the still photo that it not only reflect reality, but that it accurately describe reality as it exactly was in the 1/250 of a second that the shutter was open. We go so far as to insist that attributes that are technical limitations (digital noise at high ISOs, compressed brightness scales, etc.) be considered part of that reality and not be “fixed.”

So there are two different storytelling devices (still vs. video) and two different standards (reflecting reality vs. capturing exact reality) although they both serve the same purpose and come under the same heading — journalism. I don’t think it crosses the line into the dangerous territory of situational ethics to say that neither is wrong, or that one is more right than the other. They just are: these are the ethical guidelines that have developed to allow well-meaning and truth-concerned folk to do what they do.

What’s going to be interesting is what happens as the worlds of separate media become ever closely intermeshed (still photographers shooting video, print merging into multimedia, etc.). Will an audience that accepts as “reality” a report on a concert that mixes song A with fan reaction to song B, then reject a still image from which a pair of legs has been removed (after all, they weren’t always there)? How will the differences be reconciled? Or, perhaps more interestingly, as media merge and mingle, how will the standards, practices and ethics of one affect the other?

TAGS: PHOTOGRAPHY, VISUAL STORYTELLING, TV, JOURNALISM, ETHICS