Standards for Photojournalism Have Been Proposed, and Are Obviously Necessary
Following the disgrace that is Reutergate (link is to my NewsBusters post Sunday morning, which in turn links to many of the bloggers who did the detailed work), Dumb Looks Are Free (HT American Thinker) has proposed a set of guidelines news organizations should follow to establish the trustworthiness of the photojournalism.
I’m not expert enough to evaluate all the details, but anyone with eyes can see that photojournalism is on an accelerating descent towards a place where, without standards, nothing that we see can be believed. DLAF’s most important guidelines relate to access to originals as they were taken and before any touch-ups of any kind took place. If companies, financial services people, and others are required to keep their e-mails and other corporate records for many, many years, why shouldn’t photojournalists be under the same constraints? I would argue that the raw pictures taken by photojournalists are “corporate records” to media companies that are as important as any other. In fact, I would hope that their corporate lawyers are making those arguments even as you read this.
There’s obviously nothing wrong with making a picture look more presentable — or maybe there is, and maybe no-changes-whatsoever should be the standard if even the people doing the touching up can’t be trusted not to manipulate images. Regardless, there is something seriously amiss when the pervasive image manipulation practiced freely by Adnan Hajj and others is either considered acceptable or is so poorly supervised that it doesn’t get caught (please don’t tell me this is an “isolated incident,” or isolated to one guy).
Hajj’s photoshopping was so clumsy that it was easily caught. The question of bigger concern is how much “expert” photoshopping designed to politicize or persuade is getting past everybody?
If photojournalists don’t begin to take these issues seriously, they may find their work relegated to the equivalent of comics without the humor, and we will all be poorer for it. As DLAF says, “The era of easy acceptance of a photograph as the actual image of an event is now gone.” Photojournalists and their media buyers should recognize that this is indeed the dire fix they find themselves in, and do their utmost to recover their credibility.
