Ethical Editing

The Al Tompkins article about visual journalistic ethics made a very simple point: show your viewers what you see. It seems common sense not to add audio or alter a picture in such a way that it evokes a different emotional response. Every journalist knows that you cannot add details from one event into a description of another; it seems like every journalist would easily be able to apply this ethical code to other media. One thing that he left out of his article is the dilemma of editing out too much audio or video. When you have to cut down a story to an allotted amount of time, it sometimes becomes necessary to either leave out important details of the story that may alter your audience’s perception of the whole, or to snip out the natural pauses or filler words in your interview subject’s response. I had to cut out an aside in the middle of a recorded response, not only for time but for other ethical concerns as well. The interviewee made a joke about not selling but still serving alcohol at an establishment that does not have its liquor license – a slightly inaccurate representation of the truth that could be greatly misconstrued by anyone who heard it. I didn’t initially want to cut it because it portrayed the person’s personality well and livened up an otherwise dreary statement and because it would mean splicing together words that did not follow each other in the interview. The ethics there, and I’m sure in many similar situations involving edits of “um” or “like” or “so”, are very murky.
I guess what can be concluded from these rants is that while it is common sense that drives decisions to arrange audio and video to ethically present an idea of the situation, it may require a bit more artistic handling when it comes to deleting audio or video from the package.