Our credibility is damaged every time a reputable news organization is caught lying to the public and one of the most blatant and widely recognized cases was the computer enhancement of the TIME Magazine cover photo of O. J. Simpson. TIME took the mug shot of Simpson when he was arrested and changed it before using it on their cover. They would not have been caught if NEWSWEEK had not used the same photo on their cover photo just as it had come from the police. The two covers showed up on the news stands next to each other and the public could see something was wrong.

TIME darkened the handout photo creating a five o'clock shadow and a more sinister look. They darkened the top of the photo and made the police lineup numbers smaller. They decided Simpson was guilty so they made him look guilty. (There are two issues here: one is a question of photographic ethics and the other is a question of racial insensitivity by TIME in deciding that blacker means guiltier. The black community raised this issue when the story broke and needs to be the subject of another article. My concern is with the issue of photographic ethics).

In an editorial the next week, TIME's managing editor wrote, "The harshness of the mug shot - the merciless bright light, the stubble on Simpson's face, the cold specificity of the picture - had been subtly smoothed and shaped into an icon of tragedy." In other words, they changed the photo from what it was (a document) into what they wanted it to be. TIME was making an editorial statement, not reporting the news. They presented what looked like a real photograph and it turned out not to be real; the public felt deceived, and rightly so. By doing this, TIME damaged their credibility and the credibility of all journalists.

The photo of the dead American soldier being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu raises issues of taste, not issues of ethics. This photo is a fair and accurate representation of what happened in Somalia that day (I hesitate to use the word "truthful." Truth is a loaded concept, open to personal interpretation. What is true for one person may not be true for another. I prefer to use the terms "fair and accurate." These terms are more precise, though not completely without debate over their meaning).

If we are to use this photo, a photo that is ethically correct but definitely of questionable taste (no one wants to see dead American soldiers in the newspaper), we need to have a compelling reason. Earlier I mentioned I would give you some principles that I find useful and this is the first: If the public needs the information in the photo in order to make informed choices for society, then we must run the photo. We cannot make informed choices for our society unless we have access to fair and accurate information. A free society is based on this right. It is codified in our country as the First Amendment. We have to know what is happening in our towns, in our country, in our world, in order to make decisions that affect us as a society. The First Amendment does not belong to the press, it belongs to the American people. It guarantees all of us the right to the fair and accurate information we need to be responsible citizens.

We needed to see the dead soldier in the streets so we could make an informed choice as a country as to the correctness of our being in Somalia. Words can tell us the facts but photos hit us in the gut. They give us the real meaning, the deep and emotional impact of what was happening much better than words can. As a society we decided that we needed to leave that country.

I feel bad for the family of the soldier but sometimes the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few, or the one. In our country, we have the right to our privacy (usually the Sixth Amendment is cited) but we also have to live together and act collectively. This need is addressed by the First Amendment: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances."

It is time to get back to the theme of this report - the ethics involved with the use of computers to process images.

I like the Weekly World News. It provides a constant source of photos for these discussions about ethics. One of the more famous front pages shows a space alien shaking hands with President Clinton. It is a wonderful photo, guaranteed to make the career of any photographer who manages to get an exclusive shot of this event.

We can laugh at this photo and I have no real problem with the Weekly World News running such digitally created photos because of the context of where this photo is running. This is the second of the vocabulary words I want to give you: CONTEXT. Where the photo runs makes all the difference in the world. If this same photo ran on the front page of the New York Times, it would damage the credibility of the Times. In the context of the Weekly World News, it cannot damage their credibility because that newspaper does not have any credibility to begin with (it seems we need to create a new set of terms when we can refer to the weekly World News and the New York Times both as newspapers).

Context becomes a problem when we find digitally altered photos in reputable publications, and there have been many. For example, the cover of TexasMonthly once ran a photo of then Governor Ann Richards astride a Harley-Davidson Motorcycle. It came out that the only part of the photo that was Ann Richards was her head. The body on the motorcycle belonged to a model and the head of the governor was electronically attached to the model.

On the credit page in very small type, the editors claimed they explained what they had done and that this disclosure exonerated them.

They wrote:

Cover Photograph by Jim Myers
Styling by Karen Eubank
Accessories courtesy of Rancho Loco, Dallas;
boots courtesy of Boot Town, Dallas;
motorcycle and leather jacket courtesy of Harley-Davidson, Dallas;
Leather pants by Patricia Wolfe
Stock photograph (head shot) By Kevin Vandivier / Texastock

In the first place this was buried on the bottom of a page very few people look at, in a type size few over 40 can read and was worded in a way as to be incomprehensible.

Secondly, my feeling is that no amount of captioning can forgive a visual lie. In the context of news, if a photo looks real, it better be real. This photo looked real but it was a fake. We have an obligation to history to leave behind us a collection of real photographs. This photo of Ann Richards entered into the public domain and on the day she lost her reelection bid, AP ran the photo on the wire for its clients. AP had to run a mandatory kill when they were informed it was not a real photo.

Written Lies

Janet Cooke was a reporter at the Washington Post who won a Pulitzer Prize in 1981 for a story she wrote about an eight-year-old heroin addict named Jimmy. The Prize was taken back and she was fired when it was discovered that she made up the story. Can you imagine if the Post put a disclaimer in italics at the end of the story when it first ran, that said something along these lines: "We know this exact kid does not exist but we also know this kind of thing does happen and so we created this one composite kid to personalize the story. Even though Jimmy does not exist you can believe everything else we wrote." The Post would have been the laughing stock of the industry and yet this is what TexasMonthly is doing by captioning away a visual lie. You have to have the same respect for the visual image as you have for the written word. You do not lie with words, nor should you lie with photographs.

There have been many cases of digital manipulation over the past 20 years or so, the first of note being the famous pyramids cover of National Geographic in 1982. National Geographic had a horizontal photo of the pyramids in Egypt and wanted to make a vertical cover from it. They put the photo in a computer and squeezed the pyramids together - a difficult task in real life but an easy task for the computer. They referred to it as the "retroactive repositioning of the photographer," (one of the great euphemisms of our age) saying that if the photographer had been a little to one side or the other, this is what he would have gotten. The photographer was not 10 feet to the right and he did not get the photo they wanted so they created a visual lie. They damaged their credibility and (as I said before) taste issues have a short life span, ethics issues do not go away. Here we are almost 20 years later and we are still talking about what Geographic did.

Sports Illustrated recently produced a special edition for Connecticut on the UConn National Championship basketball season. In one photo, they showed a star player, Ricky Moore, going up for a lay up with another player, Kevin Freeman, in the frame. They also used the same photo on the cover of the regular edition of the magazine, cropped tighter but with Kevin Freeman removed. I guess he cluttered up the cover, so he was expendable.

The point I want to make here is that, if Sports Illustrated had not used the same photo twice, they would not have been caught. The computer allows for seamless changes that are impossible to see and, if you shoot with an electronic camera, you do not even have film to act as a referent. How many times has Sports Illustrated or TIME or NEWSWEEK or any of a long list of newspapers and magazines changed a photo and we the reading public not known about it? This is the Pandora's Box of the computer age.

It is not just in the computer that photographers and editors can lie. We can lie by setting up photos or by being willing partners to photo ops. These things are as big, if not bigger, threats to our profession as the computers. The L. A. TIMES ran a photo of a fireman dousing his head with water from a swimming pool as a house burned in the background. In doing preparations for contest entries, they discovered that the photographer had said to the fireman something along the lines of, "You know what would make a good photo? If you went over by the pool and poured water on your head." The photo was a set up. It was withdrawn from competition and the photographer was disciplined severely.

This is as much a lie as what can be done in PhotoShop. Neither is acceptable.

"A Day in the Life" series of books has a long history of manipulated covers. In A Day in the Life of California, for example, the photo was shot on a gray day as a horizontal. The hand came from another frame; the surfboard was moved closer to the surfer's head and the sky was made blue to match his eyes. They had about 30,000 images to pick from and could not find one that looked like California to them, so they had to create an image- an image of what they wanted California to look like.

The list can go on for pages: NEWSWEEK straightened the teeth of Bobbi McCaughey, the mother of the sextuplets; NEWSDAY ran a photo supposedly showing Nancy Kerrigan and Tonya Harding skating together a day before the event really happened; PEOPLE ran a photo of famous breast cancer survivors made from five separate negatives; The St. Louis Post Dispatch removed a Coke can from a photo of their Pulitzer Prize winner. This just scratches the surface. How many cases have not become known? The cumulative effect is the gradual erosion of the credibility of entire profession and I am not sure we can win this war. We are being bombarded from all sides, from movies, television, advertisements, the Internet, with images that are not real, that are created in computers and documentary photojournalism is the victim.