Photojournalism’s ethics in the digital age of manipulation

This paper aimed at exploring the emergence of new digital technology and how it affected the industry of photojournalism. The digital age affected journalism like it affected every aspect in our lives; it dramatically changed how photos were taken by the traditional cameras. Digital cameras made it much easier to capture a photo and to see it instantly on the camera once taken and it allow the photojournalist to have much more space to capture a lot of photos in any event he/she covering.
At the same time it made them face new challenges in coping and dealing with this new technology and to master how to use it quickly through computers and digital cameras. New tools appeared made it easy to edit and change the details of photos taken by photojournalists. As a result editing photos became easier than before by launching new software like Adobe Photoshop, it introduced a lot of tools that can be easily used to enhance the quality of photos. Dodging and cropping was the most used techniques by photo editors and were the main tools used in manipulation of images. And different opinions appeared about how they should be used and what is acceptable to be done by them or not raised a lot of question concerning the ethics of capturing and editing photos.
Moreover, with the appearance of the phenomenon of Citizen Photojournalists, they were seen as amateurs by the media people and that they don’t have any educational guidelines for their work. And concerns were raised more than before to limit their work within some codes to ensure the credibility of their photos. Especially when a lot of newspapers began to depend on the work of citizen photojournalist’ beside their own professional photojournalist’ photos.
This drove the researcher into examining the code of ethics used by news organizations to guide their professional and citizen photojournalists and photo editors on their work flow. The study found that after the digitalization of the photographic process, media organization began to put some rules to guide how the photos will be taken and edited. As the credibility of the photojournalists and the photos published were the main concerns in any medium so that they don’t lose their audience by publishing fake or severely manipulated photo.
Different codes of ethics appeared by different organizations but all were centered around taking photo that reflect the real details of the event and concerning editing , it should be edited using the new tools but without altering or manipulating it. The code of ethics of Society of Professional Journalists (SPJ) was established in 1973 Photojournalists developed the National Press Photographers Association (NPPA) in 1946. And most importantly a number of studies have found that found that the Arab and American media codes of ethics have common ethical principles and standards in order to ensure fairness in journalism and photojournalism. The prevalent principles are: independence, truth, accuracy, fairness, integrity and serving the public interest.