lm537616@ohio.edu
With Fake News at the forefront of society’s attention, one can begin to question everything that they read about. However, there is a whole other layer to fake news when it comes to visuals. There are photo and video manipulation, deep fakes as well as lazy journalism that force society to question not just what they read, but what they see.
Photo manipulation in advertising is seen as "normal" by society, but even then it leaves the public with a manipulated form of information that starts to skew societal thoughts. In the documentary “Miss Representation,” they speak about how dangerous manipulation is in the media, and how it has led to women only being seen as beautiful if they are tall and thin, which has had a detrimental impact on all women in America and in some cases, the world. In this documentary, it was explained that at the rate we’re going with female representation in the media, “women may not achieve parity for 500 years.” According to the documentary, when children are young, an equal amount of girls and boys want to be President, but when you ask them again around age 15, fewer women want to be President because the media has made it seem impossible for women to get there. “You can’t be what you can’t see.”
Society has been manipulated by the media as soon as the media took off. However, I do not believe the public thought they would be as manipulated by the news as they expected to be by advertising. In this article from The Medium, Kenneth Jarecke explains photojournalism’s loss of a moral compass and speaks on photojournalists who have manipulated their photos. For example, a photojournalist named Gene Smith had a motto that was “Let truth be the prejudice” and he “manipulated his prints in the darkroom to a degree that would make today’s pixel-pusher blush,” (Jarecke). Jarecke also speaks of the fact that no one forced anybody to abandon the code of ethics. It was a choice to manipulate one’s work. A specific organization Jarecke chose to exploit was World Press Photo who has had many scandals throughout recent years. One of their latest scandals include allowing “a photographer to post pictures on their official Instagram feed of hungry children imagining what kind of food they’d like to eat, with their hands covering their eyes while standing in front of a table set up with fake food,” (Jarecke). They didn’t take any responsibility for these false images.
What are we supposed to believe as a society if there is so much evidence of manipulation in journalism and advertising?
No comments:
Post a Comment