The University of Wisconsin made a terrible error in judgment last week, and everyone who works for the media are at risk as a result.
Wisconsin’s campus publications office printed a brochure with a photo on the cover of joyous fans at a Badger football game. Because there were no black students visible in the photograph, the office cut-and-pasted the head of a black student from another photo and inserted him in the game photo. It has since apologized and reprinted the digitally-manipulated promotional brochure, but the ethical questions around doctored photographs remain.
We don’t want to get into Wisconsin’s internal issues of campus population diversity. According to a Sept. 10 article in The Register-Guard, only 2.15 percent of the university’s 40,000 students are black. Maybe the campus community in Wisconsin needs to address that statistic.
The larger question of concern for our campus, and for the media in general, is the idea that someone in charge made the decision to alter the reality of a photograph and present that lie as truth to the world at large. This particular image wasn’t in a news publication, but even advertising and public relations need to be concerned with maintaining some ethical line of reality for consumers.
In advertisements, we are often presented with an image or a situation that is patently unreal. No one thinks the Taco Bell Chihuahua really talks, and we’re not worried here with images of unrealistically shaped women lounging on nonexistent beaches drinking cocktails. Digital manipulation is used in these ads and the great majority of advertising you see. For the most part, there’s no problem with this.
But when a promotional photo or an ad is playing on the audience by purportedly depicting the real world, nothing should be shown except what the camera lens recorded. Otherwise, we have nothing to rely on as readers and public cynicism toward the media will only grow.
Certainly, in some situations, there is gray area between what the camera saw and what actually happened. And we all need to remember as consumers that a great percentage of real-looking photographs are staged and posed. But even when reality is pre-arranged for the camera, our human brains tend to assume that the picture is showing us what the camera saw. If the public is forced to throw that assumption out the window, everything journalists do will become suspect, and the power of a reporter’s skepticism will be meaningless.
Sometimes, manipulation is done with good intent. Perhaps the person in charge at Wisconsin thought that a greater good would be served by trying to represent the diversity that is present at that campus. But the photo doesn’t show 2.15 percent of students as black. The percentage in the photo is much greater. And it didn’t happen. The piercing shrill of alarm should have rung in this person’s head. “Whoa, I’m lying. Why? Isn’t reality true enough to stand on its own? Is it that important to give lip service to diversity that barely exists?”
That lie is the most frightening part of Wisconsin’s gaffe. Someone thought it was acceptable to lie. That puts all of us in the media at risk. Basic ethics tell us that you need a really good reason to lie, and Wisconsin didn’t have one. We hope that young people intending to make a career in journalism and communication use this as an abject lesson, and that seasoned professionals address this issue in an ongoing manner. The credibility of the media is on the line.