The site BravoBox has a provocative post on an ever-present ethical issue on print journalism that has been with us for decades and seems to be intensifying: manipulative photo-journalism. Ethics watch-dogs come down hard on images that are photoshopped or deceptively cropped, but a publication’s choice of photo can be equally unfair when the picture hasn’t been altered at all.

A photo doesn’t have to be manipulated to be manipulative. If a picture is indeed “worth a thousand words”—and many are— responsible journalists and editor have a duty  to choose those words with as much attention to even-handedness and fairness as the words that appear in type.

As BravoBox notes…

“…We’re all calling each other whack-jobs and psychos, and the media greedily hands us glossy sheets stroking our ever-stiffening bias. They’ve sold us on strife, and it’s the gift that keeps on giving. Meanwhile, through either insidious pathos or outright fakery, they lay before us forgotten teddy bears on deserted streets and stouthearted firefighters silhouetted against the morning sun. Images tell us how to feel before we begin to read; before we think. How much is tweaked? How much is just good old-fashioned spin?”

A lot. The American public could have been turned against the Second World War fairly quickly if the media had used (and been permitted to use) the kind of photojournalism common today. A combination of journalistic self-censorship and the old-fashioned government kind prevented that, but today anti-war reporters can and do choose to show bloody children and bombed schools to readers because the images will nudge readers’ emotions into line with theirs. Is this fair? Is this right? Or is it unavoidable, unless we want to forego photos entirely? The images of a man about to be executed with a bullet to the head and a half-naked girl burned by American napalm played major roles in turning America against the Viet Nam War, but they were real. Is there a more ethical alternative?

On the domestic front, newsmedia tell their readership how to think about certain individuals. Watch how frequently a years-old, particularly unflattering photograph of Rush Limbaugh is still used—fat, sweaty, mouth open like a demagogic sea bass—when more recent, more neutral images of the talk-show host are available. BravoBox makes special mention of Nancy Pelosi, whose cosmetic surgery and age have combined to allow her to look either cheerily stateswoman-like or insane, depending on which photos of her you choose. They are all of the same woman, but none of them represents the Speaker neutrally. Again, a thousand words are a lot.

I think ethically responsible publications ought to consciously aim for neutral photos when ever possible, unless the images themselves are the story: it would make no sense, for example, to seek “neutral” Abu Ghraib photographs—the prisoners being forced to watch infomercials, perhaps. Most editors can’t resist choosing those thousand words more provocatively, however, so the best way to balance the ethics may rest on us, the readers. We should try to use the photographs a news source chooses for its stories as a commentary on the news source itself, rather than the subject of the story. The thousand words can also tell us just how much we can trust a newspaper, magazine or website to let us make up our own minds.