ABSTRACT
Visual journalism is the focus of the author’s work; this chapter shares her latest thinking on how photography reports the news. Photographers show truths and allow the public to witness events around the world, but they also frame the events they shoot and in so doing shape the ways those events are understood. By any measure that means that photographers also distort the news, if only by omission of what they do not and cannot show. And there are additional actors who intentionally manipulate and subvert what photographs picture of the world. How do today’s immersive and demanding encounters with still images impact editors, journalists, and the public? This chapter reflects on four roles: it considers how individuals and groups are reporting the world via images, why images remain the way that events are remembered, how invented images have become an especially potent political tool, and why partisans are contesting the meaning of even fact-based indexical images. This chapter closes with a call to action: media and the public need to reinvest in fair and accurate reporting and insist on transparency when publishing images in a news ecosystem awash in social media. At stake, quite simply, is humanity’s right to a free press and freedom of speech.
