Staging for video production

Now that print journalists are expected to contribute to multimedia presentations on news Web sites, these journalists are having to learn a whole new ethical set of rules. It has been ingrained into them that they shouldn't plagiarize, fabricate or exaggerate (though of course this still goes on), but now, they have to worry about video and photo ethics as well. Journalists are having to learn the technical aspects of video at breakneck speeds, editors should remember to instruct them on the moral and ethical aspects as well. I think there are ethical violations going on out of ignorance, not malice, right now. Especially given how quickly editors want online content wrapped.

First of all the act of staging is wrong. A journalist should never direct his or her source as a hollywood director does. This is put in the National Press Photographers Association ethics guide as "while photographing subjects do not intentionally contribute to, alter or seek to alter or influence events."

Of course, there are grey areas. For instance, the camera has limitations that need to be overcome. If you are interviewing a source, and a train rolls by blaring its horn and it screws up your audio, can you tell the source to wait a couple of minutes? I say yes. The source will still probably say the same thing, he or she will just say it later.

Also, if you are shooting an event at night or in a dark bar, is it okay to use lighting? Keep in mind, you are affecting how the scene looks. I say yes, once again you are just overcoming the limitations of the camera. The human eye might see the people in the bar just fine. To the person watching it on screen, however, they might appear as vague figures in the darkness.

What good videographers need to ask themselves is "am I lying to the audience?" When it come to most lighting or filming A-roll (interview footage) the answer is no.  However, if you ask a source to do something that he or she would otherwise not be doing at that time, even if it is something as simple as typing on the computer or talking on the phone, that is staging and it crosses an ethical line.

Karen Slattery and Erik Ugland, faculty members at the College of Communication at Marquette University, wrote a paper called "The Ethics of Staging." In it, they tell a story of a photojournalist who arrived at a field trip he was supposed to shoot too late. He asked the school children to walk through the cemetary of American soldiers they were visiting. He got the photo and it was on page one. However, I would argue the photojournalist crossed an ethical line. I'm sure he was thinking more about his deadline than moral practices, but that is not an excuse for what he did. Another option would have been for him to take a portrait photo of the girls. Portrait photos typically aren't as well received or engaging, it's the subject staring at a camera. His editor might have even yelled at him. But he still would have had a photo and would not have crossed any ethical line.

If he had a video camera he could have gotten audio from the girls, then put that over a picture slideshow of the girls on the bus, then gone back to the cometary and taken photos of the grave stones. Once again, this is not as good, but it does not cross any lines.