Technology points up importance of ethics

EDITOR’S NOTE: Jim Slusher is taking some time off. The following is a reprise of his column from Feb. 4, 2000.

One of my favorite journalism war stories dates back more than two decades but grows more relevant every day.

It was a summer morning in the time when cigarette smoke clogged the newsroom's ventilation system and the only Muzak channeling our thoughts was the irregular clatter of typewriters and wire machines. A small cadre of reporters and editors was sweating through the turmoil of writing and producing an afternoon newspaper, when a stiff-shouldered woman appeared scowling in the doorway, her young son in tow looking serious himself and a bit embarrassed.

Where, the woman demanded to know, was the photographer who had taken her son's picture at the Little League game two nights earlier?

The picture had shown her 10-year-old second baseman with his glove poised to catch a white ball that hung in the dusty air 2 feet away while a sliding opponent's foot pressed firmly into the bag.

This was impossible, the woman asserted, for she had attended that game and she had been among the parents who had showered the umpire with much-deserved insults when he declared the runner safe. Obviously, we had physically planted that ball in the picture.

Our efforts to dissuade her in this opinion were fruitless, even after we walked her through the entire production process to show how difficult it would be to manufacture that image. Not until we gave her a magnifying glass and the original negative did she grudgingly acknowledge that perhaps - perhaps, she stressed - we were telling the truth.

I'm a little ashamed to admit that we all had a smoke and a good laugh after the woman finally left. Did she really think we would sell our professional souls to alter the record on a Little League baseball game? we snickered.

Since then, I have seen how little souls can go for sometimes, so I have gained more respect for her skepticism. More than that, though, I often have wondered what we will be showing cynical mothers in a few years to allay their doubts about what we publish. Two projects in the Daily Herald during the past week brought those thoughts again to mind.

In a story Monday, a marketing executive told us that people are buying digital cameras "not to replace their 35 mm, but to do fun stuff with images."

His comments followed by just a day some "fun stuff" of our own with the image of Marilyn Monroe. We published a month ago six images of the Blond Bombshell, five of which had been technologically altered. We asked readers to identify the real Marilyn, and, as we reported Sunday, some 40 percent of the 295 people who responded were wrong.

We conducted the survey for different reasons, yet the results dramatically demonstrate cause for healthy skepticism about the images you see and read in almost any medium today.

If they want to, Daily Herald technicians can make the sky purple or give people orange skin. They can put a man's head on a woman's body or erase the Sears Tower from downtown Chicago so effectively that you would never know it had ever been there. The technicians at CBS-TV, you may recall, were so good at this that they were able to insert into Times Square over the New Year's holiday a self-promoting billboard that did not exist.

What is your assurance that we won't meddle with the images we publish? Alas, it's only our word. But we recognize the frailty of that pledge in this cynical age. So we take a strong position on the subject. Our policies forbid altering a photograph unless we identify it as a "photo illustration." Codes of ethics for such organizations to which we belong as the Associated Press and the National Press Photographers Association specifically condemn altering images to deceive the public.

Your trust is our most important asset. If you and your shy young son marched into our offices today to challenge the content of a picture in the Daily Herald, we still -in most, but not all - cases could whip out a magnifier and a negative strip to reassure you. But in five years, that probably will not be the case.

In the meantime, no doubt stories will proliferate about the abuses and "fun stuff" that the Internet and modern electronics have made so easy in the Information Age. When you hear them, keep in mind that the Daily Herald, like most serious newspapers, is committed to presenting the news and pictures of it with the highest level of accuracy and reliability we can achieve.

• Jim Slusher, jslusher@dailyherald.com, is managing editor for opinion at the Daily Herald. Follow him on Facebook at www.facebook.com/jim.slusher1 and on X at @JimSlusher. His book “Conversations, community and the role of the local newspaper” is available at eckhartzpress.com.