Picking the Spin, Spinning the Pic

A recent article in Newsweek starts off asking, "Could the Montauk Monster have been faked?" But it deals only incidentally with the Montauk Monster; the main issue is with doctored photos. It quickly seques into an interview with John Long, chair of the ethics committee for the National Press Photographers Association.

I have to say that something seems fundamentally wrong here.

According to the article, photojournalists have to work back up to the respectability of the other journalists. But it seems to me the other way around - namely, snapshots have come down to the level of respectability of the rest of the media.

Photos have been perceived as the last refuge of honesty in the media. OK, writers will put a spin on text or sound bites; we're used to that. Even the editing of video - we know somebody's spinning it there too. But now static images somehow seemed...pure. The last few years have pretty much dashed that rosy image.

My guess is the relative difficulty of doctoring photos. To fix a photo, you had to really know what you were doing because the technology wasn't available to just anybody. It was time-consuming and expensive. Even though doctoring photos goes back at least as far back as 1860, digital tech has made it so much easier to pull off. Hence more widespread. It's pretty obvious, just scrolling down and glancing at the dates of the pictures.

(Speaking of, check out the one dated December 2007. The executive editor defended the paper, maintaining that "the photo did not blur the line between news reporting and editorial commentary." Of course not: that line was blasted years ago. I'd love to blame Fox News, but that's probably just me.)

What's effectively happened is an erosion of trust in the media as such. People complain of apathy among students regarding current events, when the media themselves are at least partly responsible for this. And is there any real question why that is? Kids aren't stupid; they know when somebody's trying to put one over on them. Succeeding generations are more media-savvy than ever, and more cynical. This is a natural response, I think. Number one, there are more cameras around than ever; you can make your own video in minutes or even seconds, and post it on Youtube in seconds. People know how easy it is to dress up a picture anymore. Number two, despite this widespread knowledge, there are more visual distortions passed off as genuine than ever. This is lying, pure and simple. And it's not by joke-loving Youtubers or armchair bloggers (Le blog, c'est moi); it's professional journalists, who get paid to inform people about what's going on.

Your friend lies: how do you react after you've been burned?

Somebody you know is a pathological liar: how do you react to anything he/she says?

A one-eyed babysitter depicts lies, cover-ups, and plain old stupidity - committed not simply by subjects of the media, but by the media itself - over and over: how do you react?


I'd like to try and write up some potential benefits from this sort of situation, but - you guessed it - that's another post.