Long: "Digital Alteration Is Destroying The Credibility Of Photojournalism"
PORTLAND, OR (May 28, 2007) – The chairman of NPPA’s Ethics & Standards Committee appeared on ABC’s Good Morning America on Sunday morning to talk about the ethics of digitally altering photographs. The discussion became a national topic of conversation again after tennis star Andy Roddick said he was “stopped in his tracks” at an airport newsstand when he saw himself on the June/July cover of Men’s Fitness magazine, his arms and chest digitally enhanced to “22-inch guns” for a cover story on “How To Build Big Arms.”
NPPA's John Long told viewers that the digital alteration of images is “destroying the credibility of photojournalism and journalism in general. It is one lie after another and the public is looking at these lies and losing faith in our industry.” Long also told viewers how NPPA campaigns against the alteration of photographs.
Another guest on the story, Variety magazine editor Joe Adalian, told ABC that “it’s one thing to airbrush out a few wrinkles, it’s another thing to give someone a new set of arms.” (See cover image at bottom of story.)
Long, who’s in Portland this week to attend the NPPA Photojournalism Summit and Multimedia Immersion program, and to receive the Joseph A. Sprague Award on Saturday, the organization’s highest honor, is one of the authors of NPPA’s current Code of Ethics. He and a committee brought the original Code, written when the organization was founded in 1946, into the digital era several years ago with a complete update and overhaul. Long has been NPPA’s voice on matters concerning ethics and images for many years, and actively speaks out against the digital alteration of news photographs and images that in any way deceive the public.
The question of whether the same set of ethical rules that govern news photographs applies to magazine covers has come up for discussion several times in recent years. Some magazine art directors and editors view the cover as a “marketing page” and not really journalism, where different rules apply so that readers will see the issue and buy it at newsstands. The NPPA Code of Ethics requires that no photographs be altered, whether they’re cover photos or pictures that are inside publications.
NPPA also suggests that photographs that are not news photographs but are altered for the purpose of illustration are clearly labeled as such, and marked in such a way so that there is no opportunity for a reader to be deceived. Many times Long has pointed out, after a digitally altered photograph has been discovered, that readers do not make a distinction about the credibility of an image based on its location within the publication, whether it’s a cover shot or an inside picture.
Many magazine editors have often said that magazines operate by different rules than newspapers, and that they are pressured by celebrities and studios to do whatever is necessary to make the stars look good. Digitally removing wrinkles and flaws is one thing, but celebrities have also had their images completely faked by magazines (such as Newsweek putting Martha Stewart’s head on a model’s body; Gentleman’s Quarterly digitally taking pounds off Kate Winslet; Texas Monthly magazine putting Governor Ann Richards' head on the body of a young model who was sitting on a motorcycle; and Redbook putting Friends star Jennifer Aniston’s head on another woman’s body).
While readers may expect that about images of movie stars, news photographs are something else. People magazine recently digitally altered a news photograph by Alan Kim of The Roanoke Times who shot a dramatic photograph from the Virginia Tech massacre that moved on the Associated Press network to clients around the world. Editors at the magazine thought part of a bloody tourniquet may have been the shooting victim’s genitals. It was not, and that determination had already been made by Times editors who ran the photograph huge on their own front page. Despite that, People photography director Chris Dougherty said the magazine decided to alter the image as a matter of taste and to protect the wounded student’s dignity.
“The need to be honest with the readers must always trump the needs of being tasteful or being sensitive to personal privacy,” Long said in the aftermath. “It may be seen as a noble gesture, but it’s a visual lie. All lies damage our credibility.”
After several instances of digitally altered news photographs happened this spring, including a series of digitally faked photographs at The Toledo Blade, and an altered storm and flooding news photograph running six-columns wide in The New York Times, NPPA president Tony Overman issued a statement about NPPA's views on faked and untruthful photographs. "Unfortunately, these images have caused great harm to the audience and the profession,” Overman said. "We will do all we can to meet the increasing needs for ethics outreach and training. We’re not just going to condemn one series of incidents and then go away. We’re going to promote ethics, ethical training, and ethical outreach again and again.”
Ethics will be one of the topics of discussion this week in Portland at the organization's annual meeting of the board of directors, and during seminars and workshops at the NPPA Photojournalism Summit and Multimedia Immersion program.
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