The digital manipulation debate: Africa challenging the dominant paradigm.

Paper by Guy Berger, Rhodes University Dept of Journalism and Media Studies. Presented to Seminar on Ethics, Media Code of Practice and Journalism Training in Africa, Accra, 20 -23 September, 1999. 

Abstract.

The pursuit of truth has been a powerful rallying point for Africa’s journalists struggling against the odds for freedom of expression. While political controls have  been the major problem from this vantage point, a new “threat” has arisen from the nature of digital imaging technology which is widely seen as capable of “manipulating” the truth. The journalistic ethic upheld in consequence is to cling fast to truthfulness. This paper argues, however, that the notion of “truth”, and the corresponding understanding of “manipulation” distracts from the nature of all meanings as constructed. It goes further to suggest that once the constructivist premise is accepted, it becomes possible to construct an alternative journalism that offers richer and deeper service to audiences in Africa. 

1. Introduction: 

Commonsense Western understandings of journalism rest strongly on the notion that media should be a mirror of reality. Congruent with notions of positivism and empiricism, the assumption is that journalists can and should “uncover” truth and reveal reality to the public. Linked to this assumption is the conventional ideal of a separation between fact and comment, with the former being seen as objective information about reality, the latter being the subjective interpretation thereof. 

Within Western-style conceptions of journalism, this general epistemology of journalistic practice often co-exists with different, even contradictory notions. Thus, one may also sometimes discern, within the Western paradigm, the argument that - a la John Stuart Mill - no single journalism produces “the truth”: rather it is in the pluralism of competing versions that this holy grail emerges. Another different strand within the Western approach is that the press is not a neutral window on the world, but rather an activity with an agenda - a specifically watchdog one. 

These two additional perspectives are distinct from the first, the “mirror” position, and indeed different ethics apply to each: the first calls for journalistic objectivity; the second summons up pluralism and balance; and the third appeals to an advocacy ideal. Yet, within *all* of them, the basic assumption still exists that journalism both can and should be about the pursuit or realisation of truth. 

A fourth perspective, outside the Western liberal one, can also be identified. This is a developmentalist view of journalism, the purpose of which is information and mobilisation for nation-building and national development.  In many contexts, this view has been perverted in practice into lies and propaganda for purely political domination, but at root the original conception - like its Western counterparts - still operates with an assumption that journalism should be about truth (albeit truth in the service of development). Again, a distinctive ethic is implicated for journalism, but again, and what is important here, the common injunction is truth, notwithstanding the diverse drives in all four emphases. 

In brief, one can describe most journalism as we know it as subscribing to, and perpetuating, the idea that the practice traffics in realism. It is, simply,  contemporary and non-fictional true knowledge of reality, counterposed to fantasy, fiction or fraudulent representation.

2. Newsphotography: “tried and tested truth”.  

Hand-in-hand with the assumption of truth that permeates all this is a dominant ideology around the significance of newsphotography. If journalistic texts are - or at least should be - truthful, then the newsphotograph is the visual proof of the pudding. A news article may be about Thabo Mbeki visiting Lusaka, and - behold - there indeed is a photo of him emerging out of his plane. A feature report may describe starvation in Sudan: adjacent is a picture of a malnourished child to demonstrate the point - with a caption to the shot that gives even further confirmation. 

Text and image, it seems, work together to reinforce each other’s veracity. The assumption is that these journalistic products are truthful. After all, there they are - each one almost counting as independent evidence of the truth of a given story. The kind of newsphotos being discussed here are what Worth and Gross (1974) describe as “natural” photographs which appear to have no authorial intent - as opposed to what they call “symbolic” pictures that do carry intended messages. (Worth, 1981). 

It is against the background of this whole ethos of newsphotographs as witness to truth that diversions and deviations are identified ... and decried as being unethical distortions of the truth. For instance, when the watchdog becomes too partisan, or when the developmentalist newspaper becomes His Master’s Voice by both omission and commission, protests arise. When powerful groups suppress some voices, again the standard that is upheld against them is the notion of truth. When brave journalists stand up for their right to tell stories as they see them, they base their claim on the universal role of the media as harbingers of truth. 

Particularly amongst photojournalists, the belief in finding and telling the truth is very strong. After all, these are the people who get the images - often in dangerous circumstances - by means of photo-mechanical capture of an event or a person.  They were there, they saw it with their own eyes, they took the pictures as hard evidence. Mess with them and their pictures and you mess with truth. The camera, we hear, never lies. 

It is these same media workers who nowadays are trying to work out what digital technology means for their work. The term “manipulation” is increasingly bandied about to refer to cases where devious practioners do in fact make the camera lie (see Evans, 1989, for instance). The concern is that such practice - made so easy and so invisible thanks to digital technology - can destroy the hallowed status of newsphotos where “seeing is believing”. It threatens what Becker (1991:394) calls  “the public’s ability to trust in their photographs as unconstructed ‘pictures of reality’”.

Typically, the term “manipulation” in newsroom discourse is used as if it referred to something new in the history of photojournalism. As a concession, modern manipulation is sometimes recognised as being on a par with Stalin’s falsification of photos in the 1930s when Leon Trotsky was excised from images of the Soviet leadership.

Yet even this concession that “manipulation is not something new” remains with the same premises of those who only recently awoke to the newfangled threat of digital imaging technology.  Whether past or present, manipulation is still seen as something that gets done to the Truth - it is a distortion of a pristine, pure reflection of reality via otherwise untampered with, indeed unmediated, photographs. Ethics here are polarised between the principled purists and (purportedly) opportunistic pragmatists. The former freak out at moving a bird in the celebrated Mandela dove photograph (Malan, 1996); the latter argue that aesthetic alteration does not change the basic truth of the image.  

It can be argued, however, that the entire terrain under debate rests on flawed foundations. There are arguments that fly long and loud about the ethics of manipulation, but without interrogating what is meant by the term. Yet, it is precisely on the basis of the interest generated by such debate that it becomes possible to take the discussion further - to plumb the deeper aspects of the claims to journalistic and photographic truth. The point is, I will argue, that *all* journalism, including photojournalism - the visible proof of realism, is from start to finish an intrinsic, unavoidable manipulation of meaning. And that it is this manipulation both long before and long after both Stalin and Photoshop made their debut on the world stage. 

This is not to diminish the power and the progessive political significance of the notion of a quest for truth. This shining light has been a beacon for Africa’s journalists and media audiences who have too long laboured under decades of downright lies enforced by officialdom. Rather than rubbish “the pursuit of truth” - a noble ethical enterprise, the point of this paper is to propose that we go deeper. By understanding the limits about claims of truth and the protests about digital manipulation of truth, we can build new foundations that will take us into a journalism more suited to Africa. 

3. Truth is made, not found. 

Rather than journalists exposing a pre-existing empirical truth, we need to see them as defining, creating and representing various claims of truthfulness. Truth is not found, it is made. The manufacture of truth, however, is not according to any arbitrary recipe, but in line with hegemonic codes and conventions. Realism as a perspective appeals to common sense, but does not take account of how images are constructed - i.e. the choices that the photojournalist makes, and how audiences read and interpret the pictures. Constructivism highlights that nothing in media can be unmediated (Lister, 1995). 

“But,” a photojournalist may protest, “I take pictures of things that really exist.” Indeed, there is an iconic ontological relationship between the captured image and its referent. And, indeed, this is very different from a journalist who works in words, a medium whose relation to what is being described can only be symbolic. 

The same protesting photojournalist is likely to take this unique communicational character of his or her profession as the baseline in terms of which deviance is defined - such as the person who “manipulates” and concocts what is effectively an illustration out of disparate photographs which differ in time and space, even if only fractionally. Yet, what such indignant photojournalist misses is the way that - notwithstanding the mechanical ontology involved in his or her craft (see Slater in Jenks, 1995) - meanings are made right from the outset. 

From the start, a photojournalist may - or may not - arrange the objects or people in front of his or her camera. Either way, this is to choose for one type of meaning over another. The same photojournalist will also choose his or her distance and vantage point in relation to these objects, and that too is to make meaning in one way or another. As an example, consider how photos in a newspaper taken by children would record the world from the bottom up, as opposed to the eye-level height that adults do.  We take for granted that most of our newsphotographs match our conventional adult line of sight, yet there is no doubt significant meaning bound up in this practice - a meaning distinct from other alternatives. The results, then, of having to photograph from one place are evident in the angle that the image is taken from.  

From the type of film used, up to the choices of framing, lenses, lighting, shutter and aperture settings, through to the processing (manually or digitally) of the image, and all the way up to the selection and cropping, meanings upon meanings are selected over and above alternatives at every point along the way. Certainly, within this trajectory, one stage of the process may well significantly alter the meanings present in that before it. To restage a public protest, to shift a Coke can off the table and out the picture, and to pose people for pictures and ask them to say cheese is to do this. Even for people to notice that a photograph is being taken of them can lead to a response in a particular way - as evidenced in the celebrated photo of a bereaved mother looking up from her son’s body but smiling at the camera (Evans, 1978) 

Even to chose black and white (ironically, and symptomatically, the highest symbol of documentary-style truth) or one colour film over another, is to plump for some meanings over others - all of which add their own take to the referent being photographed. As Martin (1991:158) notes: “It is difficult to imagine how one might go about deciding whether the world really is Agfacolor rather than Kodachrome. Accuracy and truthfulness are connected to interpretations of the records rather than the records themselves.” To frame a dynamic reality without visual borders, and to turn it into a static, rectangular, reduced-size, two-dimensional image, is also to change things substantially. 

To develop film for shorter or longer times, or to view digital images on one monitor and tonal scale rather than another, is to make new meanings.  To dodge and burn when printing from a negative is to alter the image that went before it. To print one exposure at one duration and at one kind of tonal contrast and on one type of paper and at one size rather others is to interpret a negative in a particular way. To delete an element in a picture by manual or digital means is to alter the process before it.  To crop or size a photo for layout on a page is very different to the way the image appeared beforehand.

In short, there is nowhere in the entire process, whether chemical or electronic, that meanings do not shift. What this means is that the concept of “manipulation” when understood as a underhand betrayal of truth is not especially helpful. This is because it assumes that there is, somewhere along the chain of making meanings with photographs, a true path of fixed and realistic meaning which can survive, untouched, from beginning to end. 

But there is no such sacred path. There is only, on consideration, a collection of contingent factors which have come to stand as symbols of truth.  Gaye Tuchman (1978) has described this mechanism in regard to news texts by highlighting how “objectivity” is constructed via strategic ritual. In news photos, one can single out a number of customs that buttress beliefs in the images as confirmed truthful representations. 

One of these is source authority - both of the objects pictured and of the medium doing the picturing (Austin and Dong, 1994). A photo of Nelson Mandela is likely to suggest more truth than a photo of an unnamed victim of sexual harassment. His moral and political standing lends credibility to the image’s implicit claim to be a truthful visual representation of the man (albeit it freezing, artificially, a single instant in time - and in the form of a two-dimensional rendition of (only) his face, possibly in black and white!).The unknown sex victim, like an anonymous soldier or a corpse, is by contrast less convincing. Who is to say that the image is not a stock item, perhaps drawn from the archives, and presented as an illustration, rather than a record of the real?

Medium is also important in terms of conferring a quality of truthfulness on newsphotographs. “A photograph can change its meaning as it passes from the very conservative L’Aurore to the communist L’Humanite” (Barthes, 1982: 194).  A newsphoto in Time magazine has greater “truth value” than one in the National Enquirer. A photo of happy crowds greeting a cabinet minister in an independent newspaper may well have greater truth status than one in a government-owned mouthpiece. 
Another factor adding to truth value, is intertextuality. We know it is a picture of Nelson Mandela because the caption and adjacent story tell us this.  We further know this to be true because we have seen other pictures of him, most of which have also been referenced with the same nomenclature. Perhaps we have even seen the great man directly, and can recognise his features in the photo. 

The suggestion in all this is that a photo of Nelson Mandela is by definition truthful - at least insofar as the image is about him (and not about the position of a dove at a particular split second in time). 

But exactly what is the truth in such a picture? To take an example from mathematics, it is possible to say that the equation 2+2=4 is a true rather than a false statement. At a general level, this is incontrovertible. But suppose we give the sum some social content, and say 2 cakes plus 2 cats = 4 foodstuffs.  In some cultures, this is a true statement, in others it is not: it depends on your diet!. Similarly, to take the said photograph of Nelson Mandela, we need to look at the social meaning entailed. It may indeed be that the image represents (re-presents) Nelson Mandela - not an imposter, but there is actually very little meaningful truth in this. For a start, insofar as the photo represents the face of a famous name, we should pause to think here about the different truths implied were the name to be rendered (by us, the audience, or by a caption) not as Nelson Mandela, but as Ntate (father), Rolihlahla (“trouble maker”) Mandela, or (clan name) Madiba. Which name would be more true than others? Which designation - elder statesman, or retired president - is more true? What about divorcee? It is not possible to say, because these are all social meanings that can be constructed. The photo itself thus represents much more than simply a face and a name. Rather it represents a whole sum of (contested) truths about who the person is, what he symbolises, some of what he has done (and not done) and is known, etc. The photograph’s meaning  cannot be separated from these complex and potentially contradictory encodings and decodings. 

What a preoccupation on the lowering of the dove does, is to distract us from the meanings created by a completely conventional technique of meaning-making in photojournalism: i.e. cropping.  The cropping out of Bishop Tutu and Rev Frank Chikane from the bottom corner of the photo - so that they do not appear in the photograph as published - is, arguably, even more significant in affecting the “truth” meaning of the occasion than the positioning of the dove. Is the dove “manipulation” and the cropping of the churchmen not? Or are they not in fact both - in principle - indistinguishable ways in which photojournalism makes meanings? Meanings that are taken as “truthful”?

The argument here is that “truth” cannot be reduced to the form and content banality of the framed and published empirical. But the notion of “truth” misleads us into thinking that we can pinpoint simple meanings, sure that these are what (dynamic, complex) reality means. On the contrary, without socially constructed meanings attached to certain content, we cannot even identify significant objects in that content. Without such meanings, these objects (denotations if one likes) do not even feature in the radar screens of signification. It may be stated as a “truth” that Mandela is “black” (sic). But going deeper, we need to acknowledge that skin colour, for instance, only registers as a visible object in some communication contexts; eye-colour may be what catches attention in another; facial expression presents itself as a signifier in a third; posture or height in a fourth. The socially relevant connotations dictate the denotations that count as meaningful. It is what we attach meaning to that gives us significant truths - and these meanings are historical in nature. 

So, truth then is what we make of it. But we are not free agents in the manufacturing process. We recognise Mandela as Mandela in part due to intertextuality as discussed above. (Even if we did not know who he was, we would recognise him as a fellow human being due to our social intertextuality.) But more than this, of course, we recognise Nelson Mandela as a man in a discourse - of memory, gender, age, injustice, freedom, triumph, etc.  We are invited into that discourse as Althusser (1981) so many years ago phrased it: interpellated or hailed.  The photograph and its surrounding text and prominence addresses us, saying (subtlely) here’s the meaning of this - if you want to understand and make sense of this message, come on in. Recognise and identify with this way of seeing. Take up this particular subjectivity and commonsense background and assumptions - at least temporarily - in order to get what it’s all about. 

Neale, writing in Screen magazine 20 years ago, explained how in order to understand the plot in Nazi anti-semitic propaganda movies, one had to understand the codes whereby a big nose meant Jewish ethnicity and that this in turn meant devious and evil character traits. The “realism” it narrated depended on these kind of assumptions. Without such assumptions, the films were neither intelligible nor  credible. In the same way, what we take as photorealistic depends on our assumptions.  In the materialistic, secular West, we would regard as non-credible a photo-image of a Buddhist monk levitating. In some Eastern cultures, this would not be questioned. It may be argued that Western realism is more scientific than Buddhist realism. Perhaps. But it is just as socially constructed and socially dependent. And, it is just as socially transient - as times change and as, for instance, we will find newsphotographs reflecting different truths - perhaps, in years ahead, images of the elderly or the young, who seem rather rare in much of our current newsmedia. 

4. Alternative journalism, alternative truths. 

The point being made here is that all meaning - including that which passes for truth - is man-made (significantly, with an emphasis on man, rather than woman or child). This is not to say the process is arbitrary, rather it is subject to a lot of rules. For ethics, the implication is *not* a pure relativism. I am not suggesting that just because a photojournalist and an audience may manufacture meaning in relation to  photographs of Nelson Mandela, that we should unhestitingly shift doves around the page or fabricate photos of levitating gurus. But an awareness of the construction of meaning leads us to questioning the prevalent Western liberal journalistic myths - not least where they come from and their suitability to our situation. 
If all meaning is, in a sense, manipulated, the term “manipulated” itself is a social construct - with its own determinate meaning. According to theorisation and research by Cass (1998) and Lazaro (1999), the term is typically (although unconsciously) used for very specific kinds of meaning making - that which breaks conventions. In short, these conventions are (1) the rules of realistic representation (what we take for granted as being realistic in an image - including, weirdly, even the rendition of reality in the colours of black and white); and (2) the rules behind the rendering of such images.  Conventional professional wisdom cries “manipulation” if the process produces an image that runs counter to our expectations - where it looks like trick photography was used. The same outlook also calls something manipulated if the result looks realistic but the means of producing it were non-standard. 

What then are these expected images, and what are the “standard” techniques?  Expected images come precisely from our familiarised consciousnesses - they are the oft-told, indeed now legendary, story of Nelson Mandela, rather than the story of a streetchild. They are of “newsmakers” - a tautologous construct of the mass media age if ever there was one.  They reflect the orthodoxy of newsvalues needed for realist credibility - for familiar “truth” as we recognise it. What they do not reflect should give us cause for thought: what are the other “truths”, and how do they compare and contrast with those that journalism-as-we-know-it tends to give us? Ought we not to consider pursuing some of these?

Standard techniques in the profession refer, ironically,  to what one might have thought was the “dodgy” practice of dodging and burning, and the even dodgier cropping, scaling and placement of newsphotographs in layout. In principle, these operations are no different, fundamentally, to those regarded as non-standard operations, the latter being techniques like cloning, deleting or moving elements (done manually or digitally).  There is no logical or intrinsic reason why one set of techniques, which alters the image preceding it as much as any other set, is legitimate and another is not.  All that explains the difference is custom. And if it is not therefore set in stone, let us revisit such a custom. 

If we are going to reconsider then, the notion of truth with its fixed (artificial) framing of reality and its frozen techniques of forming this representation, then we can ask what kind of rules might guide an alternative practice. 

In representing meanings about Africa, we might consider new rules for the newsworthiness of expected images, informed perhaps by gender and health considerations - criteria that would see (at last) some domestic coverage of female genital mutilation for instance. We might also explore African characteristics such as respect for ancestors, and begin to inform our journalism by the motto, expressed by author Stephen Clingman (1998:1), that “a life begins long before it starts, emerging from other lives before returning to them again“. We might explore indigenous orality and idiom. This is rather than the constraints of journalese as we are taught it, and where the specific uniqueness of myriads of situations is subsumed and blurred under the general cliches like “tensions were high”; “a woman was raped”; “three die in car accident”; “Mbeki arrives in Lusaka”. 

In examining the techniques for a new approach, we might consider dispensing with the current fetish that favours some techniques and rules out others. Instead, we might indicate in one way or another how *all* our words and images are made, and expressly explain how these are, after all, just representations that may help some people engage with reality. That is something different from the illusion about producing the “truth”. 

Television always makes the mistake of thinking that if there are no pictures, there is no news (and conversely, the mistake that if there are good pictures but insignificant story, then tell the insignificant story). If we foreground the notion of story (and incidentally understand it in an African sense - which typically includes a moral to the narrative), then we can use new technology to make pictures (still or moving) where necessary in order to tell the tale. Conversely we can also free ourselves of telling stories just because there are traditional “realist” pictures - like yet another project being opened by a publicity-obsessed president. 

This is not to suggest that fabricated pictures should be presented as equivalent to ones that have had relatively different meanings framed within them. But if these are just degrees along the same spectrum, then it is to ask whether greater honesty in all photographs, and all journalism, might not be considered. I am thinking here of a kind of media literacy built into journalism - which certainly does not set itself up as a transparent window through which one can see the truth of the world. Instead, it is a journalism that alerts audiences to the opaqueness of the glass and the frame of the panes. 

And ethics? The proposition here is for an ethic that debunks the claims for and against truth in media.  It is for an ethic that acknowledges,  instead, that journalism deals only in contested, fragmented and fluid knowledge about reality, not in truth or in reality as such. It is for an ethic that suggests that this knowledge might be generated under a different set of rules to those currently in place in the profession - a set that is more appropriate to the traditions and to the trajectory required for democracy and development of this, our, continent. 

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