jz673213@ohio.edu
@jake_zuckerman
When it comes to the written word, the AP Style book is the journalist's bible. It teaches it all: the difference between cement and concrete, flack and flak, even that and which.
As far as proper quotations go, the book gives a simple doctrine when it comes to altering quotes -- don't do it. Ever. Such is the writer's line in the sand: Never alter quotes.
But what about when it comes to photography? A picture of a scene is a visual capture of a story as it occured. Is touching it up, putting a filter on, or scrapping blemishes from the photo any different than altering a quote?
Everyone knows John Filo's iconic picture of Mary Ann Vecchio screaming in agony, looking over one of the victims of the Kent State Shooting. The picture won him a Pulitzer Prize. But for all the picture's merits, there is a rather unfortunate blemish. A fence post in the background looks as if it extends vertically from the crown of her head, as if she is screaming from pain of being impailed by a fence post.
As time went on and history reflected on the long-term implications of such a tragedy, a doctored version of the picture entered circulation. The picture edits out the fence post for a much more aesthetically pleasing picture.
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| Photo courtesy of The New York Daily News |
This picture is by no means the only doctored historical photo. The New York Daily News maintains a collection of pictures that we've all seen before, but not in their original form. (My personal favorite: Abraham Lincoln was a lot uglier than history chooses to remember.)
Socrates, the grandfather of ethics, said that there are no moral absolutes, there's way too much gray in between right and wrong for anything to always be one or the other. Case in point: Narciso Contreras. Contreras, a Pulitzer Prize winning photojournalist, was fired from his freelance job with NPR for doctoring a photo. A rogue camera got into the frame of his shot of a Syrian fighter. He cropped the camera out and lost his job and reputation following the incident.
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| Photo courtesy of NPR |
So where does this leave us? Touching up photos is never ok, except when it is ok? Did Contreras distort the truth when he removed a video camera from the background below a Syrian rebel? The reality of the situation is no, but that does not justify doctoring photos.
A journalist's job is to tell the truth, the whole truth. And the truth is always caught in the mucky-muck between opinions, emotion, subjectivity and circumstance. Maybe Contreras' camera is distracting in the shot, but it was still there. His job as a photojournalist is to tell the story as it happened. Not to tell the story for how he would have liked for it to happen. A camera caught in a shot is sloppy, doctoring photos is unacceptable.
The same goes for Filo's photo. It would have been nice if the fencepost did not convolute the meaning of the scene, but that's how it goes. A messy, honest picture is better than a breathtaking lie.
At the end of the day, media watchdog Dylan Byers said it best. He wrote in Politico, "though a seemingly benign it fell beneath the guidelines of AP's news values and principles."
A journalist's job is to tell the truth, the whole truth. And the truth is always caught in the mucky-muck between opinions, emotion, subjectivity and circumstance. Maybe Contreras' camera is distracting in the shot, but it was still there. His job as a photojournalist is to tell the story as it happened. Not to tell the story for how he would have liked for it to happen. A camera caught in a shot is sloppy, doctoring photos is unacceptable.
The same goes for Filo's photo. It would have been nice if the fencepost did not convolute the meaning of the scene, but that's how it goes. A messy, honest picture is better than a breathtaking lie.
At the end of the day, media watchdog Dylan Byers said it best. He wrote in Politico, "though a seemingly benign it fell beneath the guidelines of AP's news values and principles."
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