Why do I feel like I've never heard this before?

I feel like the ethics behind photos and video are not quite as ‘important’ as those for writing. Not that they don’t matter, or that you don’t have to follow them, but that they are often overlooked, both in the classroom and in the real world.

I took Principles of American Journalism as a freshman last year, and I read Bill Kovach and Tom Rosenstiel’s book, but I do not remember in class talking about how it applied to photos or video. We only applied it to print, or maybe sometimes broadcast. Ethics as far as photos and video were completely left out. But why?

I guess it is because video and photos fall into a more artistic side of journalism. Their class siblings, film and photography, are two of the most creative art forms around, but I feel like that is all the more reason to stress the importance of ethics.

When you write, for print, magazines, blogs, whatever it may be, the more poetic or eloquent you write, the more you cross the lines between journalism and literature. Fancy writing is in novels, short stories, not in everyday journalism. Yes, I think descriptive writing and other literature techniques can make a story better, but too much of it makes it untrue.

The same goes for video, photos, and while we’re at it, audio. Just because it is easy to add an artistic flare to a piece does not make it write. In Wertheimer’s example of the NFL draft party, you see it was easy for those reporters to ask them to reenact the moment. It was even easier because the subjects agreed to it. This is undermining our craft, not our ‘art’, our craft. Yes journalists do some cool things, but it is not ‘art.’

Reenactments, lighting tricks, audio ‘sliding’, and other effects are just the easy way out. Just as asking someone for a specific quote about something is taking a shortcut. And in my experience, I’ve learned journalism is not at all about shortcuts.