Ethics: Walking the tightrope
By Chad West
18 April 2007
Chad M. West
Ethics In Photojournalism
Although the advent of digital photography has brought photojournalists a new set of digital ethics, academics and experts agree that profession's core values have remained unchanged since its inception.
In addition to traditional ethical considerations, like adhering to community standards and avoiding casting subjects in a false light, photojournalists today are presented with the everlasting temptation to digitally manipulate their photographs with the software suites found in nearly every newsroom, said William Davie, Ph.D., media law and ethics professor at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.
"Obviously, embellishing a photograph could, quite easily, be considered liable for damages, if it materially distorted the goal, the purpose or the persona of the subject, and we have cases to that effect," Davie said.
"When does it reach that point?" he continued. "I wish there was a bright line, but there is not. Was O.J. Simpson's complexion darkened enough to be a false light? I tend to think not, but there are areas that ethically require our attention that the law simply is not built to determine and shouldn't be—or we'd be hauling people into court for failing to brush their teeth—offenses that don't rise to the level of crime or tort."
Despite the warnings that usually abound in newsrooms, photographers like former Los Angeles Times photographer Brian Walski, sometimes cave in to the pressure to deliver excellent photography on a rigorous hour-to-hour deadline.
Walski, whose manipulated photo of a British soldier directing Iraqi civilians appeared on the paper's front page, was fired in the field in 2003 after admitting to combining photos to achieve a better composition.
Digital alteration, although an everyday temptation, is not the only consideration photographers must make. The traditional ethical values, although seemingly second banana to image alteration, persist as important aspects of photojournalism.
The decision to publish crime or accident scene photos, for instance, often weighs heavily on most photo editors, especially in small or conservative towns. The standards of the community at hand are often the key factor editors and journalists must ponder when running gory photos, said Peter Piazza, photo editor for The Daily Advertiser, a daily newspaper in Lafayette, La.
Because of Lafayette's tight-knit community and The Daily Advertiser's reputation as a family newspaper, Piazza explained, the paper's policy is not to run gory accident or crime scene photos. Its editors, however, have been greeted with situations that left no choice but to include the objectionable content.
"There have been times when we have not been able to get around it, and there have been times when we had to show graphic images," he said.
Alice Ferguson, photojournalism and media design instructor at UL Lafayette, agreed.
"I would guess that newspapers are the last holdout category, because many people do consider newspapers to be family publications," she said in a separate interview. "They lay around on the breakfast table; the children see them; they're around the house. That, I think, is what generates more of the phone calls."
The' N. Pham, deputy director of photography at the Houston Chronicle, however, had a slightly different take on the subject. Documentation and publication of an event, he insisted, are very different.
"As a photojournalist, [a person] must document the good and the bad at the scene," Pham said. "That does not mean the paper will publish it. It is our obligation to document it. We are photojournalists, not photographers.
"We are asking our photojournalists to be journalists at the scene," he continued. "That means to investigate it, to record it and to be sensitive to the victims. Visual journalists must maintain the distance at the scene, especially when dealing with victims. We need to show respect to our subjects, especially at the tragic scene."
Ferguson advocated a story-by-story approach to considering bloody photos. A strong written story, she said, can often eliminate need for a graphic photo.
"What I would do is gather up the stakeholders in the newsroom," she said, "the photographer, the reporter, the editor—and look at the material together, because then you can determine how much of the story is being told with the words in the story and how much of the story relies on that picture. "Sometimes you'll find you can avoid using one of those difficult pictures if you have really good well-told written story," Ferguson asserted. "Other times, the picture is everything. It really is worth the 1,000 words and then some."
Paparazzi photographers, however, often have no qualms with pressing the shutter button for the high-priced photos—sometimes to a fault, Ferguson suggested.
"They're not going to win awards; they're not going to get a Pulitzer (Prize); they're not going to be in the journalism textbooks, but they stand to make a lot of money," she said. "I think that's the dividing line."
"Would I consider those people to be necessarily photojournalists?" she mused. "Probably not, because they're not using the standard news values that the typical photojournalist would use. They're looking for that big-dollar photo, so I would put them in the category of commercial photographers rather than news photographers."
Davie, however, vehemently disagreed.
"You could take a very orthodox, holier-than-thou impression of what is a journalist and be quite comfortable with that, but that is defying reality," he retorted. "There is a desire for a certain amount of entertainment news. Entertainment news sometimes involves celebrities.
"To say that that's not legitimate journalism is to scoff at the fact that every newspaper from The New York Times all the away down to the local dish wrap has a section that they devote to celebrity birthdays, celebrity entertainment, and they always will," he said.
Whatever the subject, photographic style or technique, adhering to a journalistic code of ethics is germane to winning the public's trust, Piazza said.
"The bottom line is that you have to have a certain standard—a certain ethical code—in order to, basically, have the public and your readers believe you," he held. "If the public doesn't trust me, I can't operate in this business, and that's the bottom line."
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