Cartoons Don’t Kill People. . .

                Humorless religious fanatics kill people.

                As we’ve seen too many times over the past few years, cartoons can inflame passions.

                It has ever been so. It is said Thomas Nast moved out of New York City to Morristown to get away from Boss Tweed and his minions. Whether that’s true or whether he, like many other rich people, just wanted to escape summer in pre-air-conditioning New York, it remains true that Tweed said, “I’m not worried about editorials because I know my constituents can’t read, but they sure do look at the cartoons.”

                Regardless of what brought Nast to the cooler suburbs, he survived there, in a rambling Colonial house that still stands on a tree-lined street two blocks from the old Alfred Vail mansion.

                In recent years, cartoonists have not been so lucky. In 2006, Muslim outrage resulted in arrests in Norway for an alleged terrorist plot against a Danish newspaper. The anger was directed against cartoons perceived to be anti-Muslim.

                And then there was Paris.

                The invasion and murders at the offices of Charlie Hebdo rocked the world of journalism as it rocked the world at large.

                Journalists have never been unrealistic about the occasional dangers of the job. From Robert Capa on a Vietnamese beach to James Foley in a Middle Eastern desert they know the  perils of the  “disputed barricades” written about by Alan Seeger during World War I.

                But France was not a battlefield. Or it was not supposed to be.

                It became a battlefield.

                It was Signe Wilkinson of the Philadelphia Inquirer who made the statement about cartoons not killing people. She is one of the few remaining staff cartoonists on a major American daily and the only woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for cartooning.

                She was on a panel sponsored by the Deadline Club, the New York City chapter of the Society of Professional Journalists.

                A number of SPJ chapters held ethics events since the organization introduced a revised code of ethics last September.  Charlie Hebdo intensified the discussion.

                And by discussion, I mean, often, debate. Journalists tend to be like Episcopalians in that they are never short of things they disagree on.  And the talk may get heated. And there is often whiskey.

                The big discussion at the time of the Paris massacre was whether to reproduce the cartoons. The arguments on both sides seemed as valid as they were intense.

                At the Deadline Club discussion, Gail Gove, legal counsel for Reuters, explained she asks the question, “who could die” when faced with a decision to run a controversial cartoon or photo or story.

                “Are our people safe” is Reuters’ bottom line, she said. “We have to think about the consequences. Sometimes the most heroic thing you can do is not publish.”

                She also noted it can be a disservice to the readers if Reuters’ correspondents are expelled from a country for something published.

                Part of the reason cartoons incite so much passion is they are in-your-face.

                “You can’t paraphrase poetry,” Victor Navasky, former editor of The Nation, commented to the deadline club, adding, “that’s even more true of cartoons.”

                And, of course, it is. Cartoons strike you as funny, or not. Offensive, or not. But, they are what they are. And the good ones are memorable.

                Which is to say cartoonists have the same responsibility other journalists have.

                Garry Trudeau says you always punch up at authority. Just another way of saying what Finley Peter Dunne told us:  “comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable.”

                So did the Deadline Club’s panel answer any questions? Not really. It did continue the discussion, the debate. Which is probably all we could have expected.

Ethics in the Dark

     I wrote a group of columns a while back on my take on the revised Society of Professional Journalists Code of Ethics, but I didn’t delve too deeply into the topic of photography.

     The point of that series of columns was to concentrate on what was covered in the discussions at the SPJ National Convention. These discussions often (and predictably) centered around the written content. And sometimes rather excessively about commas.

      But, I really need to approach the topic of ethics in photography for two reasons. The first is that several entries in a national photography contest were recently disqualified for excessive Photoshopping. The second is that my first newspaper job came about because I could fill in for the darkroom tech.

      I learned processing and printing from my next door neighbor who was a professional photographer. I also took a couple of classes. My first “media” job was recording events for the historian of the Morris County American Legion when I was 14.

     My first professional job was on a small-town weekly, that glorious, and dying, breed. It was a great place to start off a career. Everyone carried a camera in those days, even the ad reps, because you never knew what would be happening.

     All of the milestones of someone’s life were celebrated in the pages of the paper. Births, First Holy Communion, scout events, first deer, senior prom, engagements, weddings and obituaries. We used to get a kick out of new hires who grew up in a city and looked askance at the proud young boy or girl with a first deer or really big trout. Those are rites of passage in small town America.

     Photos were sacred, a record of the lives of our readers.

     The darkroom at The Star-Gazette was designed by a 6’6” photographer. That’s roughly 14 inches taller than I am. I had a stool to stand on when the enlarger had to be in the top position. I also had to stand on it, hold onto the rim of the sink and lean all the way over to turn the water on and off.

     Negs weren’t always perfect. A little burning and dodging was sometimes necessary. And we weren’t Richard Avedon. We cropped out the extraneous details around the edges.

     We didn’t think too much about the ethics or the protocol of our darkroom touch-ups. But then, there wasn’t much that could be done.

     Advertising agencies could airbrush unwanted details. They had the tools and the time.

     But, it took work.

     Today, it’s way too easy to perpetrate post-production tinkering on photos.

     Lines must be drawn. The meaning of the photo can’t be altered, any more than words can be altered to change a story.

      And, just as the technology can’t be used as an excuse to fudge something in a story, it can’t be an excuse to make a photo something it isn’t.

       The right wing is fond of parading photos of President Barack Obama without an American flag lapel pin.  That’s so ridiculously easy to fake, it’s amazing they even did it. If they really want people to believe something negative about the president, you’d think they’d have enough ambition to work at it.

       The supermarket tabloids are so notorious for photoshopping celebrities to look incredibly bad, it’s become the natural reaction to assume all head shots are faked in some way. They even put one celebrity’s head on another body.

      Lying is lying. With words or with pictures.

      It’s sad the people who judge photography contests have to lay down the law and disqualify photos for fudging, but it’s necessary.  Just as necessary as policing for plagiarism. And just as sad.