Our Voice

Time Magazine reported this week that French politician Valérie Boyer is proposing a bill that would require a disclaimer at the bottom of altered images in newspapers and magazines.
The bill is backed by 50 members of France’s parliament and seeks to combat negative body images and eating disorders. Under the bill, the new advisory label would be printed along with photographs that have been edited beyond socially responsible and acceptable parameters.
The Colonnade staff supports this decision and hopes that the same policy will reach publications in the United States soon.
With continuing advancement in photo-editing technology and this software becoming more and more affordable to the general public, small publications and individuals now have the ability to manipulate photos any way they please, causing an ethical dilemma of “how much is too much?”
Some magazines have taken full advantage of photo editing to make their models thinner and flawlessly beautiful, but newspapers too have had their share of photo manipulation scandals. For example, the 1970 Pulitzer Prize-winning photograph by John Filo of a slain student at the Kent State shootings was circulated by The Associated Press with a large pole in the background appearing to intersect a woman’s head. The pole was edited out by some publications for artistic purposes because of that intersection. However, when Life magazine published the edited version of the photo, it failed to hold up its responsibility of presenting the full truth to its readers.
Even though the message of the photo was not compromised by the removing of the pole, it opens the way for more liberal editing that has the potential to present an alternate reality to the viewer as truth.
The Colonnade believes that viewers have the right to know if the photographs they’re seeing have been altered in any way outside of the ethical standards of the publication. We believe we need to hold all publications in the United States to the same high standard. We at The Colonnade limit our editing to cropping photos and adjusting the exposure to account for the printer and paper quality which is used to produce our newspaper.
As a mass media outlet, we have a responsibility to our audience to present the truth. Just as in written articles, the photographs and visual elements need to be true-to-life honesty and if they are altered, the viewer needs to be informed that the image they see is not the original image. The Colonnade takes this responsibility very seriously and we are proud to hold our paper to that high standard.

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ColonnadeLetters@gcsu.edu.

Posted by Colonnade Archives on Oct 9 2009. Filed under Our Voice. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0. You can leave a response or trackback to this entry