There is no turning back. No way of understanding the impact digital images will continue to have on what we call news, and, beyond that, what we call reality.
It appears that many manipulated or "faked" images emerge within hours of an event -- competing with the media's ability to inform the public in the best way it can. Other images appearing later in the news cycle often present as parody or tongue-and-cheek satire. The former class of images, those that come out first are almost undetectable on first glance. These sort of images (see below) are the most problematic for news organizations. They challenge the media to make choices it would otherwise avoid.
Source: Flikr
Photo manipulation is a technique enabled by software that affords individuals to create new images from pre-existing composite elements of an event, place, person or thing. From this perspective, as critical theorist Jean Baudrillard argues, “It is no longer a question of imitation, nor duplication, nor even parody. It is a question of substituting the signs of the real for the real.” As we examine the image above what do we see?
Visual perception is a function of the brain, which helps us to make sense of what we see. The brain, by itself cannot distinguish what is real. What our brain processes as reality is cognition and reason -- the ability to place what we see within a context through comparison to other visual events. In the other words, it becomes incumbent on us to evaluate the source and the context of images, even when they are disseminated by so-called legitimage news organizations. The manipulated images of bin Laden, unfortunately, presents a context that proposes a truth -- death. By appealing to our intellect and emotions the images are presented to our rational mind and consciousness as real unless they can be disputed. Visual elements, often viewed within the context of news, appear authentic because we have been taught to trust the media. More than ever before the normalization of news is being threatening by digital photo manipulation.
Of the surface, we could discuss manipulated images in terms of ethics alone - something that wouldn't necessarily include the ideological or political economic function of such pictures.
Ethics are, more than anything else, an argument, which is subject to political, social, cultural, and other values. Ethics are social constructions of what society authoritatively prescribes as what "ought to be." Pictures that masquerade as the "truth" challenge this authority. But ethics are slippery. They challenge what is true, especially when applied to the prevailing definition of news, because they can disrupt our cognitive processes and manipulate us emotionally. A while ago I wrote, "An unintended consequence of the digital age is a growing distrust and skepticism of photography’s ability to convey truth. Digital technology makes manipulating images so easy and fast that people have begun to challenge any picture that does not conform to what they perceive as a truthful representation." But words can also deceive. Coupled, words and images, construct what we perceive to be true. Regrettably, this is increasingly less reliable. Some would also say, that this has always been the case -- and that being manipulated by the media has always been a part of our culture.
What is also confounding about image ethics is that pictures are wedded to the textual narrative used to describe what we see. Without text, meaning is even more disputable. Text, it appears, adds a finality to the interpretation of what a picture tells us.
Perhaps this is what the Obama administration is afraid of as it deliberates releasing the images of bin Laden's death. There is no way Obama could possibly control how the images will be used and interpreted. In other words, let the world simply imagine what happened in that compound during the raid. Better yet, let the story continue to unfold with words because showing the images might reveal a truth the public could not be primed for. The argument of the assault, then, will take on an entirely new dimension. There is no predicting what a decision to release such images would mean to Obama in the arena of public opinion.