Our Obligation to Truth

By John Schwartz
js135210@ohio.edu

While finding a common theme in the various readings we were given this week might seem difficult, all of them deal in some way with truth, and journalists' obligation to it. If you remove an awkwardly placed figure in the background of a picture, can you publish that? Should you put pictures of a beheaded journalist on the front page of your paper? How much should the public know?

The opinion I gleaned from our readings is that any doctoring of photos that are made to be published in a newspaper or journalistic magazine is absolutely prohibited. Your audience is relying on you for honest, informative reporting and by, say, combining two photos together (as Brian Walski did in 2003) even if taken seconds apart, is dishonest and indisputably unethical.

Brian Walski's Blunder, Taken from Hany Farid's Website

Another dilemma facing journalists today is not only the content of the pictures but the context. Al Thompkins of the Poynter Organization wrote an article in 2012 highlighting the differences and importance in the backdrops Mitt Romney and Barack Obama used while addressing the Benghazi Crisis in September of that year. Romney was moved last minute to a more presidential backdrop with lots of dark blue and American flags present. Obama, on the other hand, chose to address the nation in the Rose Garden, whose location and therefore context unconsciously lessened the anxiety of the American people.

"Consider for a moment how the President’s remarks would be different if he was sitting behind the desk of the Oval Office," Thompkins writes. "Think of the stark seriousness of the setting he chose the night that he announced that Osama bin Laden was dead."

Journalist's obligation to the truth lies not only within keeping images the way they were shot, but also in giving proper context to the pictures themselves.

This also plays an important part in journalist's role as gatekeepers -- what do the public need to see, what can and should they be protected from? Should the bloodied picture of Moamar Qaddafi be shown on a nightly newscast? Should an article about the recent beheadings performed by ISIS be accompanied with stills from the videos documenting the atrocities? These are questions we must ask ourselves, for as the world gets more and more saturated with technology, it is simultaneously becoming a much smaller place.

Issues of a less pivotal nature come with magazines such as Cosmopolitan, who quite heavily doctor the images that they place on the cover of the magazine in an attempt to make the celebrities on them look more attractive and more like an 'ideal' woman. Since these magazines don't really fall into the journalistic category of magazines such as TIME and The New Yorker, the doctoring of these images is of a less crucial nature. In recent years they have been catching more and more flak for this practice however, and competing magazines such as Seventeen have taken a no-editing stance when it comes to their photos.