I wrote the following piece last week for a terrific new Website called "Subtitled."
According to editor Phillip Ennemoser, Subtitled is a small group of art students from Salzburg University, Austria. Currently the students are engaged in establishing "a permanent resource for global reportage photography; the focus is on online galleries, portrays of photographers, exhibition, festival and book reviews as well as on a growing network."
Educators thinking about going online to extend learning beyond the four walls of the university classroom might well consider Subtitled as an exemplary model of innovative and engaged learning.
Audience Expectations of Images as Truth
Visual content in news production, over the past 100 years, has been shaped by several underlying pressures, which include but may not be limited to, consumer culture, social tastes, economic and ideological interests, moral and ethical judgments, antecedent practices in journalism, technological innovations, and the social psychological behaviors of news creators and consumers.
In other words, to understand the deeper structural and personal processes underpinning the visual consumption of information as news we must consider a range of behaviors, both of the visual journalist as well as the visual consumer. Therefore, it becomes imperative to reflect on what constitutes a real or truthful representation of an event as displayed, portrayed, and distributed in mass media, be it online or in print. Today, we call upon students, educators, professionals, and the general public to challenge and question all forms and means of media production and consumption, including the array of decision-making processes and behaviors that have been previously left unexamined.
Images consumed as authenticate and representative depictions of reality govern the production of the conventions and traditional standards of content – visual material that is informed and motivated by a individual, institutional, and societal expectations and obligations.
For example, audiences expect news images to be made without the insertion of personal or political bias, and therefore, it logically follows that the journalist may feel obligated to comply. This assumption appears, on the surface, fairly straight forward, but the reality is far more complex and problematic. Visual credibility means that the people who make images, as well as those who eventually view them, establish and maintain an implied social contract of trust, for better or worse. In this case, the social contract between source and user implies a sense of confidence in the authenticity of the process.
Trust , in this case, refers to not only what the audience expects to see in a picture, but also what journalists feel obligated to present. Audience expectations of visual reportage from the on-going conflicts around the world in the New York Times or Le Monde, may differ greatly from those representations aired on Fox News, SKY News, or even Al-Jazeera. What do audiences expect to see when they look at news images in the visual reportage of the news? How practical is it to believe that such reportage could ever be completely free of personal, institutional, corporate, or societal biases?
Although this may appear to be an obvious and naïve line of questioning, audience expectations of how news is framed and socially constructed for us exists on a visual continuum determined by the source ability to engage in a process that maintains facticity, actuality, verifiability, balance, institutional credibility, accuracy, bias, objectivity, and the perceived neutrality of the observer over time.
Until recently, audience expectations of visual credibility appeared to be a seriously under examined area of media criticism. Looking at what different audiences expect to see in news images in terms of efficacy and saliency may help to better predict how visual information contributes to the creation and implementation of major foreign policy decisions.
The credibility of a news source is largely a matter of perception, real or imagined. Audiences imbue a news source such as Le Monde, El Pais, The New York Times or Fox with credibility as something to be valued over long periods of time. Given the rise of increasingly hostile and aggressive elements on the Internet criticizing not just one or two visual news accounts, but the veracity of all images, present inordinate challenges for traditional news sources.
The credibility of news photographs is often based on the assumption that what we are looking at is provided to us as a truthful representative of an occurrence – free from bias or manipulation. Unfortunately, a priori assumptions like this one have fallen victim to the politics of authority – a politics where all images and their sources become suspect. The veracity of the visual in our culture, despite its checkered history, is tied, however, to an even larger culture of capitalism and consumption.
In a state of advanced capitalism establishing and maintaining bases of power encroaches on public trust. Mass media cannot escape the paradox of attempting to earn public trust, while it caters to corporate and political interests. In order to make informed decisions in our lives, there is no substitute for accurate and balanced information. The implications of a public turned against the press because all faith has been lost in its ability to function openly and honesty in society is becoming a dreaded reality.