New Media, Old Problems

As news organizations enter the digital age (some more reluctantly than others), there is a great deal of thought going into the problems of reporting the news online.  It’s great fodder for thinkpieces.  But while the digital world does introduce some new problems for journalists to solve, many of the problems it supposedly creates are really problems that have been at the heart of journalism for decades, if not centuries.

One point Dr. Lee touches on briefly in her article is that the instantaneous nature of the internet leads to extremely speed driven reporting, where sometimes it’s better to report something first than to report something accurately.  But that isn’t exactly a new trend.

This, for example.

Similarly, editors coming to terms with Photoshop and other forms of digital image manipulation are only continuing battles that have been fought for ages.  Reading the New York Times article on photo alteration, you would think that traditional photography was somehow incapable of telling a lie.  But, as Sontag points out in On Photography, the photographed image has always never exactly represented objective truth:

While a painting or a prose description can never be other than a narrowly selective interpretation, a photograph can be treated as a narrowly selective transparency. But despite the presumption of veracity that gives all photographs authority, interest, seductiveness, the work that photographers do is no generic exception to the usually shady commerce between art and truth. Even when photographers are most concerned with mirroring reality, they are still haunted by tacit imperatives of taste and conscience. The immensely gifted members of the Farm Security Administration photographic project of the late 1930s (among them Walker Evans, Dorothea Lange, Ben Shahn, Russell Lee) would take dozens of frontal pictures of one of their sharecropper subjects until satisfied that they had gotten just the right look on film -- the precise expression on the subject's face that supported their own notions about poverty, light, dignity, texture, exploitation, and geometry. In deciding how a picture should look, in preferring one exposure to another, photographers are always imposing standards on their subjects. Although there is a sense in which the camera does indeed capture reality, not just interpret it, photographs are as much an interpretation of the world as paintings and drawings are.

Of course, this doesn’t touch on one of Dr. Lee’s most salient points, and one that I think really is unique to journalism in the digital age – monetization.  While journalistic ethics with regard to speed, accuracy, and bias has always been a subject for debate, never before has the actual cash value of news been negotiable.  People, myself included, expect our news coverage on the internet for free.  And that truly is a huge change.