Video Ethics

Anton Berkovich

I agree with Poynter Online that the same principals of ethics that apply to photos should apply to video. As technology gets better, it becomes easier and easier to alter images and make them look more dramatic. While I don't think unethical video editing happens on as wide as scale as photo might (though I'm not really sure about that either), I have seen some questionable acts by journalists on TV. The biggest example I can think of came from CNN last year. I was watching a journalist named Gupta talk about problems with Michael Moore's documentary, Sicko. At this point in the show, he was talking about how Cuba's healthcare is not as good as people make it out to be, and at the same time, CNN shows a frame from Sicko showing the list of countries with best healthcare. What I thought was unethical was the frame was edited (purposefully, I assume) to make Cuba harder to see, and if you didn't know it was there, impossible to see. While CNN didn't add or remove anything, they definitely decieved the audience and contributed a lot of bias to the piece.