A picture, a magazine cover and manipulation
Journalism means to be responsible for the content and target in the information. That is important in all kinds of journalisms: print, TV and also Photographic. In digital era, manipulating information is much easier than before. So, what is the boundary between being ethical and no ethical in threaten information? One clear example happened in the magazine The Economist in July. The Economist has run into a controversy over a cover picture of the American President Barack Obama that suggested he was standing alone on an oil spill beach. But, as the above pictures show, the cover image had been "edited" to conceal the fact that he was standing next to two other people.
The cover did not just cut the other persons in the picture, but with that brought the idea of loneless of the president. It was the ideal metaphor for a politically troubled president. Moreover, it changed the meaning and the feeling from the people that looked at it. So, it changes completely the information. From one normal visit to other that means much more concern and worries. So is it normal and fair in journalism?
“We do sometimes alter the images we run on the cover (though not the ones inside the newspaper)”, said The Economist's deputy editor explains how this particular cover came about: “I was editing the paper the week we ran the image of President Obama with the oil rig in the background. Yes, Charlotte Randolph was edited out of the image (Admiral Allen was removed by the crop). We removed her not to make a political point, but because the presence of an unknown woman would have been puzzling to readers. We often edit the photos we use on our covers, for one of two reasons. We don’t edit photos in order to mislead”.
The New York Times, in revealing the picture manipulation, reports that the editing upset Reuters, whose photographer, Larry Downing, took the original shot. The paper quotes a statement by Thomson Reuters: "When it comes to its own photographers, Reuters has stringent standards regarding photo editing. [It] has a strict policy against modifying, removing, adding to or altering any of its photographs without first obtaining the permission of Reuters and, where necessary, the third parties referred to."
In my opinion, the rules of photojournalism should be more clear and restrict, because, even if it is not so unusual to modify a picture, if it has existed since the beginning, when it comes to information, not only illustration, they should be more careful.
Batchen, Geoffrey. (1997). “Epitaph” in Burning with desire: The conception of Photography, Cambridge: MIT Press.
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