PolicyByBlog

 David D. Perlmutter has been invited to write the chapter on "War and Visual Media" for the Encyclopedia of War.

David D. Perlmutter was not able to attend but his co-author (Monica Postelnicu, LSU) gave their presentation on "The Blogging of the President: How Online Social-Interactive Media Helped Obama Win" at the Broadcast Education Association 2009 meeting in Las Vegas.

In class, I screened the HBO Documentary, The Trials of Ted Haggard, about the "fallen" evangelist. The documentary raises some major issues about media ethics.

1. To what extent should someone making a documentary explain the context of an event? For example, we really don't learn much about the pastor's settlement with his church.

2. When a documentary focusses on one person, should we not also learn about other key characters? There is no in-depth interview with the man who had relations with the pastor. He just states his position and that's that.

3. Does the documentary filmmaker need to tell us "what side" she is on: is she making the pastor look bad, or just letting him talk without a point of view?

 In my Journalism Media & Ethics class we screened the HBO documentary "Ganja Queen," which told the story of a young Australian woman who was accused and then convicted of importing marijuana into Bali, Indonesia. The documentary raises a number of questions about the ethics of representation of true-life stories, especially in an age of online social-interactive media and "reality" television.

First, to what extent does a broadcaster or documentary filmmaker owe it to the audience to update knowledge about a subject? In this case, there have been numerous developments since the documentary was filmed, some of which probably would radically change the audience's perception of events.

Second, most ordinary people are not media-savvy in the sense of having the degree of self-awareness to know when something they are saying or doing looks wrong or suspicious on camera. Does a documentary filmmaker, especially in a criminal case, owe it to the subjects to help them be at their best for the camera, or is the goal to be as unstaged and unprompted as possible?

Last, do we have different expectations of journalistic values for a high-end documentary on an essentially entertainment network like HBO? What are those news values, and do you feel the documentary followed them?

Recently, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates discussed and then announced that the U.S. government was going to reverse an 18-year policy on banning photographs of the flag-draped coffins of U.S. service people who have died overseas arriving at Dover Air Force base. The ban was controversial. Many families of service people supported it because they felt that having media present, especially video and still photographers, would be an intrusion on their privacy. Other families advocated allowing pictures to document the sacrifice of the fallen. (The event is one now seen in fiction, as in the HBO movie "Taking Chance.")

Politically, the ban was perceived by opponents of the Iraq war as a way to hide the cost of the conflict from the American people. War supporters argued that the ban was more about respect for families. The new policy seems to be to allow families to state their preference concerning media presence. Complications that might arise will stem from the fact that often multiple coffins are delivered at the same time.

It will also be interesting to see if the policy changes once American casualties escalate due to increased fighting in Afghanistan.

In any case, the policy is one about which people of good will can disagree. I'll add one further observation about why the ban probably has been overturned: There is a recognition, albeit one slow in coming, in the Pentagon and now in a White House that is much more new media-savvy, that with cell phone cameras, digital photographs, and YouTube, it is impossible to limit picture-taking to what used to be called "the media." Perhaps the new policy is an acknowledgment that, whereas once upon a time you could censor the press, now you can't censor everyone.

I was interviewed by The New York Times for background and then quoted by the Associated Press and the BBC's "The World" radio program about the story.

Some of my previous writings about war imagery:

David D. Perlmutter. "Photojournalism and Foreign Affairs." Orbis, 49(1) 2005: 109-122.

David D. Perlmutter. Visions of War: Picturing Warfare from the Stone Age to the Cyberage. New York: St. Martin's, 1999.

David D. Perlmutter. Photojournalism and Foreign Policy: Framing Icons of Outrage in International Crises. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 1998.