The Ethics of Routine Visual News Framing

• In Event: Ethical Perspectives on Visual Framing

Abstract

It is most often exceptional images that prompt ethical debates in public discussion: photographs of shocking violence; images that seem to exploit and display the suffering of victims; photos that intrude upon the privacy of those in personally vulnerable, revealing, or even tragic circumstances; images that assault and offend the sensibilities and dignity of social groups; or those that reveal transgressive and horrific and acts. Those pictures that diverge from the expected norms of daily media fare are most likely to attract critical attention and raise ethical concerns regarding both photojournalism practice and the propriety of visual content.
Yet, routine conventions and practices of photographic publication, more than the unexpected breaks from that routine, play the largest role in establishing predominant representational frames in media production. Visual personification, the use of visual emblems, symbols or readily recognizable stereotypes to mark locations, institutions, and cultural identities, the use of found footage or file photography to stand-in for unavailable pictures, and the largely prescribed pictorial aesthetics of professional photojournalism, all contribute to conventional (and often nearly automatic) practices of visual news framing, prompting ethical questions about the ways in which the media routinely cultivate a naturalized view of the world.
This paper argues that the routine, daily practices of photojournalism, with their embedded visual propositions and recurring and naturalized worldviews, deserve greater critical and ethical interrogation. The analysis proposes a set of particularly common practices of visual representation in news production that should be exposed for their implicit ideological and ethical implications.

Author

• Michael S. Griffin, Macalester College