Should journalist, or more specifically photo journalist, be able to doctor photos to more effectively push the ideas behind their stories? Should it be ethical to manipulate photos to better support the article it goes along with?
My immediate reaction was to just say “NO WAY!” that there were no exceptions to photo editing other than the basic techniques to make the photograph a little sharper or just lighten things up a bit, but the more I think about it, I am not sure if all manipulation is completely immoral.
If you think about it, if every major news paper manipulated different major details in the same picture… you would never really be certain of what was happening in the story. Doctoring photographs is sort of the same idea as finding out facts in a journalism story and then purposefully changing them to something completely different just to get people to think differently about the topic. This is not telling the facts and it is not allowing people to make informed, intelligent opinions about what is going on in the news.
I would say the only time that I would think that it was one hundred percent allowed to do photo manipulation in photojournalism would be when doing a photo story about nature or things on that topic. Georgia Okeef is known for a project that she did where there was the skull of a cow in a lot of her pictures. Although Georgia herself put the cows’ head there, I do not think that this caused any harm or changed public opinion in any way.
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