Staging

Elise Crawley

In reading the staging article, I agreed completely that it was unethical and pretty ridiculous for a reporter to ask a family to recreate a certain moment in their lives because the cameras missed it the first time.  At the same time when the author was speaking of sitting at people's homes and waiting around and getting footage of them washing dishes, I couldn't help but think that he was really lucky to be so secure in his job that he could spend his time like that.  My question really was, if you ask people to just go about their daily life and pretend that you're not there, don't you think eventually you would just get someone who stretched out on their coach to watch TV for a couple of hours?  Yes, they may be a world-champion runner or run an amazing business or any number of interesting things, but does that doesn't make them inherently interesting all the time.  When you work on a deadline, how can you wait around for the moment when someone is going to walk from one room to another so you can get a shot with some motion in it?  

Journalism is the art of reporting truth.  Especially with visual and auditory journalism there is question as to how much art can imitate life.  Essentially when you get back and you edit everything down to the two minute package you've been delegated from a hour of footage and interviews...you're making choices that affect how people perceive that story simply by virtue of what you have decided to omit.  

There are ethical lines which shouldn't be crossed in journalism, but in order for us to be better journalists we have to recognize that even following all of those ethical guidelines, you are never able to report absolute truth--just your own approximation of it.