On staging

At the risk of oversimplifying an issue that occasionally has more gray area than I’m about to give it credit for, I don’t see video staging as all that much of a dilemma. We as journalists work in a profession predicated on truth and accuracy. As such, anything that could result in the deception of audiences has to go. Period.

Yes, in an ideal world we could show every major newsworthy occurrence exactly as it happened. However, as we all know far too well, the world isn’t an ideal. We don’t get every event of note on camera. So we make do with what we have. Whether it’s building a story around a particular event in a way that allows us to tell it effectively without showing said event or playing a security video that unfortunately doesn’t have sound (as was alluded to in the Poynter reading), the value of storytelling is easily trumped by the virtue of truth and transparency.

It isn’t good enough for journalists to be perfectly accurate 99 percent of the time. All it takes is one time for one allegedly inconsequential part of one story to be illuminated as fabricated in any regard, and a media outlet’s credibility can be completely shot. No matter how small a detail it appears to be, once the audience knows that we as journalists aren’t completely truthful, they will have no impetus to trust us in later controversies. It just isn’t worth it.