Picture Tells The Truth

Photos are a powerful tool journalist’s use to summarize a story, highlight an event, motive people, and many other forms of visually communicating a story with viewer. When it comes to picking a photo to go with a story proper ethics should carefully considered. Intrusions of privacy or graphic images are a couple of ethical problems journalists face. As a Christian, we don’t have to exploit it, but using our faith is important to guiding our decisions and choices we make as writers or photojournalist. Daniel Okrent makes a few solid points in the article, “No Picture Tells the Truth. The Best Do Better Than That.” Okrent states that, “The surpassing power of pictures enables them to become the permanent markers of enormous events.” This is true, because when you think back on historical moments that you read about or saw on Television,

The photo was used to supplement an article on the devastation of an undersea earthquake in the Indian Ocean and a third of the children had died. The editor who chose the picture, Jill Abramson, said it fit the article and showed the enormity of the disaster. The photo received a lot of criticism and many said this was unethical. Yes, the photo shows devastation, but are we really seeing the enormity of the disaster or just sever dead bodies? Other photos could have been choose, like damage done to a schools or houses where children gather, but we are shown their lifeless bodies instead. To me this doesn’t show the enormity of the disaster, we know from the title that many children had died, we don’t need to see it, to know it. As a Christian I don’t think it is ethical or necessary to post pictures of the dead in the news. The only time photos of the dead in news should be posted is to server a purpose to indentify a body, much like they did during World War