By Donald R. Winslow
(August 2, 2006) – Photography and visual ethics are currently hot topics in the journalism community, particularly at two daily newspapers owned by the McClatchy Company. In recent days, a staff photographer with The Charlotte Observer parted ways with the newspaper for “inappropriately altering” a photograph before it was published. Then, at el Nuevo Herald, editors combined two separate photographs into one fake picture which was published with an anti-Castro story about Cuban police allegedly ignoring prostitution. In the second instance it appears that no one has been fired or disciplined for creating or publishing the fake photograph, and many in photojournalism are asking just what made one instance an apparent firing offense and not the other.
At the Observer, editor Rick Thames wrote to readers on July 28 that a photograph by staff photographer Patrick Schneider that had appeared in the newspaper on the front of a Local and State News section was “in violation of accuracy standards” and “improperly altered.” Thames said the picture “depicted a Charlotte firefighter on a ladder, silhouetted by the light of the early morning sun. In the original photo, the sky in the photo was brownish-gray. Enhanced with photo-editing software, the sky became a deep red and the sun took on a more distinct halo. The Observer’s photo policy states: ‘No colors will be altered from the original scene photographed.’”
“Because of the most recent violation of our photo policy, Schneider no longer works at the Observer. We apologize for this misstep. Your trust is important to us. We will do all we can do to ensure the integrity of all our photos going forward.”
Schneider, contacted by News Photographer magazine this week, said that he would not make any comments about the incident nor will he answer reporters’ questions. He has been an NPPA member since 1992, and previously shot for The Indianapolis Star.
In 2003 after Los Angeles Times staff photographer Brian Walski combined two images into one picture from the war in Iraq that was published in the Times and other newspapers, he was fired when the fakery was discovered. The Times and other Tribune-owned newspapers, including The Hartford Courant, went to great lengths to explain to readers how it happened, why the photographer was fired, and what their ethical policies are regarding the alteration of photographs. The Times, in their very prominent public apology, went so far as to show the two original Walski photos and then show how they were digitally combined to create the one false published image.
Unlike the Los Angeles Times in the Walski case, The Charlotte Observer did not publish the “before” and “after” versions of Schneider’s pictures to let readers decide the extent of the alteration for themselves. In the Observer’s online version of Thame’s statement, Schneider’s photo was also not published. And the picture in question has since been replaced online by another photograph from the fire scene. In print, the picture in question was the dominant image in a two-picture combo that was packaged with the fire story.
Schneider’s altered firefighter photograph also moved on the Associated Press picture network. AP director of photography Santiago Lyon told News Photographer magazine tonight that The Charlotte Observer called AP when they realized the photograph had been altered and requested that AP eliminate it, which they did. An AP Photo Elimination bulletin moved on the picture network which said, “Editors: Please eliminate from your picture desk and archive NCCHN101 Slugged Apartment Building Fire transmitted Wednesday July 27, 2006. The member has rescinded permission to use the photo. (AP Photo).”
The Observer’s Position
"Because this is a personnel matter, it is inappropriate right now to go into further specifics about Patrick's experience,” Observer editor Thames told News Photographer magazine. “To the extent that we explained it to readers, our goal simply was to correct the record.
“However, I can tell you why we have policies governing the alteration of photographs. Journalism can not be about original works of art unless it is labeled as such. That is why we label photo and art illustrations. It's why editorials go on pages labeled for opinion.
“Journalism, however, does often capture art in real life. Photojournalism is one means of doing that. Writing that's grounded in factual reporting is another.
"Sometimes, our tools fail us. The camera settings don't accommodate the circumstances. The notes aren't legible in our notebooks. The tape-recorder fails. To the extent that we journalists are confident about what we saw or heard, we may rely on our memory to tone a photo to reflect the original scene photographed, or to reconstruct the quotes. Toning for accuracy is allowable under the language of our photo policy.
“If we are less than certain, however, it is misleading for us to guess or simply imagine what we saw or said. And we should never alter the actual color of scenes photographed or invent quotes.
“Our photo policy states clearly: ‘No colors will be altered from the original scene photographed.’ Our news stories and photos are not interpretive forms of art. When our tools and our human memory fail us, we must go out and try again to capture art in real life.”
In Thame’s published message to readers he also said, “Schneider said he did not intend to mislead readers, only to restore the actual color of the sky. He said the color was lost when he underexposed the photo to offset the glare of the sun.”
That Schneider “did not intend to mislead readers” is something the photojournalism world has heard before. In 2003, he was suspended from work without pay for three days for adjusting colors in photographs that were entered in the North Carolina Press Photographers Association’s annual contest after some NCPPA members and leaders of the organization complained about three of Schneider’s images. Their complaint came after the contest’s judging was finished and awards had been determined, but not when the photographs were submitted for competition. The pictures under scrutiny had not been altered when they were published in the newspaper but only in preparation for the contest. As a result of the investigation that followed the complaint, an inquiry that the Observer and then-editor Jennie Buckner participated in, Schneider’s three awards for the pictures were rescinded by the NCPPA and he was suspended from work.
Later that year at the NPPA’s Women In Photojournalism conference in Charlotte, Schneider participated in a panel discussion on ethics and showed the “before” and “after” images as part of the discourse. “I know that I probably went too far on some of my burns, and my paper has made our standards clear,” Schneider told Ken Irby in an interview for The Poynter Institute for Media Studies. “I will no longer tone my background down that far.” At that same time Buckner said, “I do not believe that Pat intended to deceive. And this was all so new (digital ethics standards) that we had to establish standards and defend our paper’s credibility.”
NPPA's Code of Ethics was updated in recent years by the Ethics & Standards Committee specifically to address circumstances like the ones faced by Schneider and the Observer, and the ethical challenges and opportunities that digital technology creates for photojournalists.
Chuck Liddy, president of the NCPPA, was asked by News Photographer magazine if the NCPPA, or anyone affiliated with the organization, played any role whatsoever in the current incident involving Schneider. “The NCPPA had no role in the latest incident of Patrick Schneider's violation of ethics,” Liddy wrote in response.
Unless Schneider's photograph went directly from the photograher and into print, it had to have been managed by at least a picture editor and a page designer. Editor Thames did not answer questions from News Photographer about whether others at the Observer participated in the publication of Schneider's altered photograph, and what safeguards had been established after the previous ethics episode to make sure that situations such as this one did not happen again.
So it’s still unclear who discovered that Schneider’s photograph had been altered, and neither Schneider nor Thames or anyone else at the Observer’s photography department is volunteering to answer that question.
Not The Only Ethical Breach
Days before Schneider’s photograph became a problem for the Observer, editors at el Nuevo Herald manipulated two separate photographs and combined them into one fake picture to make it appear that police in Cuba were ignoring prostitution. The caption published with the fake photograph reads, “The government has proven incapable of confronting the dramatic phenomenon of prostitution.” The Spanish-language newspaper is well known to Florida readers for its rather transparent anti-Castro editorial agenda.
The Miami New Times, a popular alternative weekly newspaper, reported that photographer Roberto Koltun, who several years ago took one of the images involved in the fake combined photo, objected to el Nuevo Herald editors about what they planned to do with his picture. The other half of the fake photo was taken from an Associated Press photo by photographer John Moore shot in 1998, according to a story in the South Florida Sun-Sentinel and also by el Nuevo Herald’s own admission.
As of this writing it appears that no one at el Nuevo Herald has been disciplined or fired for creating or publishing the fake photograph. Humberto Castello is the newspaper’s executive editor. He is quoted in an Associated Press story by reporter Laura Wides-Munoz as saying it was “an accident” that the fake photograph was published without “an identifying headline” that would tell readers the picture was a “montage.”
“Here there were two mistakes,” Castello says in Wides-Munoz’s AP story, “one that the photos weren’t properly attributed, the other was that it was not then clarified.” The newspaper said it now plans to offer el Nuevo Herald photographers, graphic artists, and editors “a seminar on ethics and design.”
Later, in their own story headlined “A Necessary Explanation for the Reader” by Daniel Shoer Roth, published in el Nuevo Herald on June 27, section editor Andres Reynaldo says, “Our intention was to make an assembly photograph that included photos of several sources. We committed two errors: the graphical treatment did not respond to the intention exactly and we did not publish the pertinent credit.” The story also says that photographer Koltun did not complain about his picture being used in the combined image before publication, as The Miami New Times reported, but objected only after it was published and he saw it in the newspaper.
The Associated Press also had something to say about the use of Moore’s AP photograph in the el Nuevo Herald “montage.” “We informed el Nuevo Herald of our extreme displeasure that they had used an AP image in that fashion,” AP's Santiago Lyon said today.
“The (Miami) photo is a lie,” said John Long, NPPA’s chairperson of its Ethics & Standards Committee who is also a long-time photojournalist and picture editor for The Hartford Courant and a frequent author of journalism ethical commentaries. “If a documentary photo looks real, in the context of news, it better be real. No amount of captioning can make a visual lie go away. If you respect the news photo as much as you respect the written word, you would never try to explain away a visual lie. If it looks real, the context of news, it better be real.
"Some have suggested that Spanish language newspapers not be held to the same standards as English language newspapers since they come from a culture that has different standards. This is bunk. A lie in any language is still a lie. Apparently no one has been held accountable for this lie and this is not right. Our hope is that any editor who would do such a thing would be held to the same standards we set for photographers who lie, and be disciplined or fired.”
“Speaking as someone who works at a Spanish language newspaper, I completely agree,” NPPA past president Alicia Wagner Calzada said. She is a staff photographer for Rumbo in San Antonio, TX. “When news is presented in the United States, it is presented in an environment of newspapers with high ethical standards, who print truth and who do not fabricate photos. Spanish language newspapers must meet that standard or they will lose all credibility amongst their peers, their subjects, their advertisers and most importantly, their readers. That would be a terrible outcome for this blossoming industry.”
“The el Nuevo Herald incident is a simple case: a visual lie was created,” Long said. “The case involving Schneider is different in that it is not a matter of a flat-out lie, it is a matter of degree. I have not seen the original file (although I have seen online a copy of the newspaper’s published page). I do not have enough information to judge his actions. If the newspaper decided he exceeded the ethical standards set by the Observer, that is their prerogative. Where a newspaper draws its lines in the sand is up to that newspaper.
“Schneider’s case cannot be looked at in isolation,” Long said. “He has been disciplined in the past for ethical problems of the same sort as this new one. Because of past problems, the newspaper has developed a very strong ethical policy and the cumulative effect might be more important here than the specific event. But one principle remains most important in all this morass: journalists and photojournalists must retain their credibility with their readers and any lie, either a flat out lie or a violation by degree, destroys the credibility of all journalists. We must be accurate in what we report or we will destroy our profession.”
Long observed that the fact that both newspapers involved are owned by The McClatchy Company and that in one case a photographer was fired while in the other case no one has been reprimanded seems unfair. “Most newspapers are autonomous and do not refer back to the parent company for direction in matters such as these. But now that it has become an issue however, McClatchy might want to weigh in on the matter.”
The McClatchy Company is nearly 150 years old and is the second-largest newspaper company in the States. It owns both The Charlotte Observer and el Nuevo Herald, which is one of the largest Spanish-language daily newspapers in the States with circulation near 100,000. Last week McClatchy, based in Sacramento, CA, disclosed that it paid five executives $1.57M in bonuses for their roles in purchasing Knight Ridder newspapers, including the Observer and el Nuevo Herald.
Talk Of The Town
These two latest photojournalism ethical episodes have also created a great deal of online discussion in photography forums about what is and isn’t ethical in the digital era, giving some insight into what goes on in the reproduction of photographs at many newspapers as well as what photographers themselves actually believe is and isn’t ethical.
Some of the online comments include discussions about whether or not a particular lens, such as a fisheye (an extremely wide angle lens), distorts reality and visual truth and is therefore unethical, and details about what one employee at an unnamed newspaper’s pre-press production department has been instructed by his managers to do in order to make all the pictures in the newspaper “light and bright” with “more vibrant colors” than may actually exist in the original picture.
Several years ago when digital technology moved into photojournalism and replaced film and darkroom prints and the digital altering and manipulating of images began to surface in multiple ethical violations, Long noted, “The genie is out of the bottle, and it won’t go back in.”
But not all of the recent ethical violations have been committed by photographers – editors and page designers have committed their share of visual ethical offenses as well. The Society of News Design, led this year by president Christine McNeal, a deputy editor for the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel who has been an NPPA Best Of Photojournalism contest judge in the past, has responded by creating a Code of Ethics for designers that is very similar to the NPPA’s Code of Ethics for photojournalists and picture editors. SND’s past president Bill Gaspard is coordinating creation of the code. In their current draft, the Preamble states:
“As members of the Society for News Design, we have an obligation to promote the highest ethical standards for visual journalism – for all journalism – as they apply to the values of accuracy, fairness, honesty, inclusiveness, and courage.”
Regarding honesty, the SND code says, “We value original thought and expression. Our work will be free from fraud and deception -- that includes plagiarism and fabrication. We will attribute content and honor copyrights. We will strive to keep news content free of special interests, inside or outside the news organization.”
