Guest Commentary: Making the News
Dec 14th, 2009 • Posted in: Commentaryby Ethics Newsline editor Carl Hausman
I saw the argument between Tiger Woods and his wife, Elin Nordegren, and watched her chase him down the driveway with a golf club. Actually two million other people (and still counting) saw it too — thanks to a “re-enactment” on YouTube.
And while it looks more like the Sims than news footage, the piece, confected by a Chinese video-animation company, has become a media sensation, offering what the New York Times notes may be “the future of journalism, tabloid division.”
The Chinese firm churns out 20 or so digital animations a day, most dealing with local stories and Taiwan news. Animators record movements of live human models resembling the subjects, animate digital figures to resemble the real people, and then program their software to depict movements according to a scripted storyboard.
While it’s unlikely that anyone could mistake the animation for real-life video (even the animation company admits it didn’t do a very good job depicting Tiger Woods’s features), this very well could be the Next Big Thing in media ethics.
And that’s troubling for several reasons:
- Although the depicted actions are based on pure guesswork, the technological nature of the “re-enactment” lends a spurious precision to the presentation. Garbage-in-garbage-out transactions are decorated by the veneer of technology, mutating into what I call “precision garbage.”
- Video and digitized re-enactments of crimes and crime scenes are beginning to be admitted as evidence in courtrooms, and according to a recent book on the subject, are proving to be more persuasive to juries than oral presentations. Even if we assume that digital animations admitted in court pass expert scrutiny, we’ve moved the medium of digital animation into the presumed category of a depiction of truth.
- The “public mind” is not always adept at sorting through its contents and determining which parts of what we “know” came from fact and which from fiction. An inventory of “facts” from urban legends and forwarded internet propaganda bounces around the jumbled neurons of the public mind, and we know (we all know, personally) that there are many people who can’t tell fact from fiction or just don’t want to make the effort.
Sometimes the lapses between reality and media depiction are amusing: British actor Sir Alec Guinness regularly received sacks of mail seeking his wisdom — mail written by people who confused him with his Star Wars character Obi-Wan Kenobi.
But often the confusion is nothing short of sinister. Yes, there are people who believe that Lyndon Johnson conspired to assassinate John F. Kennedy. Some were directly persuaded by a preposterous film scenario, though I have encountered people who never saw, or don’t recall seeing, Oliver Stone’s JFK but assume the concoction to be real because they’ve either “seen something” or “heard about it.”
The problem from a media-ethics point of view is that you can’t really embrace a zero-tolerance policy on altering images. The word image itself come from the Latin for “a likeness” and descends from the same root as imagine.
Video has to be edited — the image altered — unless we want to watch every occurrence in its entirety, and even then the image is not a pristine specimen of reality. Former U.S. House speaker Tip O’Neill demonstrated that in his famous confrontation with cable TV network C-SPAN, in which he forced a cameraman to zoom back from a close-up of a congressman giving a speech to show the virtually empty room. Either way — the close-up or the long shot — the medium changed the message.
Images have to be cropped and the colors adjusted, a problem dating back to the first color-film cameras that could not register blue very well, so skies were often hand-painted in (which might lead to a silly but nonetheless logical suspicion that the weather was better back then, because few bothered to paint in the clouds).
Visual journalists long have grappled with the reality problem. Is allowing someone to pose for a picture, rather than just taking it, a distortion of reality? (Which of course raises another intriguing question about the nature of reality when the posing is done in relation to a pseudo-event like a press conference or ribbon cutting.) Is Photoshopping wrinkles from a subject’s face a distortion, or is it a correction of a distortion caused by harsh artificial light from the flash?
The news industry always has grappled with the uneasy mixture of fact and image. When videotape first came into widespread use, networks and local televisions stations bombarded viewers with frequent reminders that programs or portions of programs were recorded earlier “for presentation at this time.” There was a real worry that time-shifting could distort reality, deceiving viewers into thinking something was happening now when it happened in the past. (Not such a terribly quaint notion: Last month, Fox News was forced to apologize twice for failing to disclose that it used canned footage of older, better-attended rallies in its coverage of the current days’ events with smaller crowds.)
And how do we draw the rules for depicting reality for the rest of television programming? Clearly there are different standards for entertainment and news, but what about all of the stuff in between, such as true-crime shows and the semantically challenged category of “reality” programming? Does a parenthetical graphic stating “re-enactment” or “simulation” absolve the producers of all culpability for errors and omissions?
Those are questions we still haven’t figured out, despite decades — even centuries — of wrestling with the complex issues involving photography, cinema, and TV. So maybe we’d better start thinking about the computer animation issue sometime before the next century.
©2009 Institute for Global Ethics
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Rushworth Kidder will return to this space next week.
For more information, see: Connecticut Law Tribune, Nov. 6 – Los Angeles Times, Dec. 9 – New York Times, Dec. 6 – Vancouver Sun, Nov. 14.
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Recent footage shown behind Fox News stories has also been shown to be faked (a large demonstration shown while talking about a much smaller one), and the list goes on. As long as the enticements of fame and money matter more to people than honesty and truth, fakery will be widespread. The digital age just makes the deception easier, and the work of ethics education more important. Thank you.
This is an issue that troubles me greatly. The phenomenon that has been occuring this last week over Tiger Woods has been especially distrubing to me. HOW – could it possibly be ethical ? appropriate ? quality journalism ? for the NBC Morning News – The TODAY show – to be using TMZ – tabloid footage as SOURCE information from which to report. REALLY ? Is that where our major news networks have come ? How embarassing and how tragic for the american people and journalism. Today a LEAD story about a photo of Elin without her wedding ring – I am so stunned that I continue to see this drivel leading the morning news – why ? because its what people want to hear ? Once again how tragic for our culture – I thought the fourth estate was supposed to be informing the people about what they needed to hear. I am so afraid quality journalism that informs, educates and elevates society is near death. I truly hope I am proven wrong. Who will be the standard bearer now ?
Carl: Your addressing of virtual “reality” in the visual media is right on. It is an area which for too long has been skirted, or at best treated obliquely. And an area equally skirted is that which you refer to as “the public mind”. Like the issue of race in our society, one of the problems has been a general reluctance to discuss it in order to avoid appearing “politically incorrect”.
It is time to face up to the issue of the “public mind”. There is a major (and growing) faction of the general public who are, either by choice or by the pressure of daily duties, almost totally ignorant of what is going on in the world outside their own immediate circle of awareness. And they are not necessarily dumb folks either; simply grossly unaware, perhaps tuned-out because of mistrust of the media or simple information overload. It is this segment that advertisers, PR folks, political sound-bite purveyors, and all manner of information manipulators often target to achieve their marginally ethical objectives.
This might be a whole ‘nother subject but, with information technology exploding almost exponentially, it will be increasingly easy to prey unethically on this “public mind” group, perhaps with results which could prove disasterous to us all.
Ed Collins
West Newton, PA
Carl’s analysis is right on: an animation of any newsworthy item should be taken with a spoonful of pablum. Authenticity should never be assumed by human cartoon manipulation. However, in the case of Tiger Woods, who cares? There are certainly as many as 1,387,375,299,391,926 issues in the world which takes precedence.