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A return to 'Mr. Gates': Photography and objectivity
Newspaper Research Journal, Summer 2000 by Bissell, Kimberly L
"This paper is not minority-oriented," one photographer said. "The traditional views of the previous publisher were filtered down through the news room. This place points a lot of fingers, and the nonrepresentativeness starts from the top down."
But, despite an underrepresentation of women and minorities in photographic content, the news editor said she thought the paper did well representing the newspaper's audience. "We try to do the senior activities," she said, "but we also try to grab the 20-to-30-year-old reader. I think the minority population is very small here so our lack of images of minorities is okay."
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One photographer said the representation of gender, race and age was often consciously made when stories were being covered. "I think about who is in my picture," one photographer said. "I ask myself, do I have women? Do I have men? Am I getting any blacks in there? I believe that when I start thinking who I am getting and not getting, I am losing the essence of the event."
Decision-makers admitted that individual opinions, routines in the newsroom, and pressure from the publisher all affected photographic content.
Discussion
The first research question addressed the levels of influence on content. As the results indicated, influences on content were evident at the individual, the routine and the organizational level.
Individual influences
White" found in his study that "Mr. Gates"' decisions in news selections were quite subjective and determined very much on an individual basis. As the results from this study indicated, the process of photo selection was also quite subjective. Photographic gatekeepers at this newspaper made decisions based on political preferences, perceptions of audience expectations and personal opinion about explicitness. The wire editors were in complete control of wire content, and these three people had varying definitions of news. The photojournalists indicated they sometimes chose their subjects based on gender, race, or age. While this behavior may not deviate from the norm, the question is how often are these subjective, personal decisions made? As Tagg" suggests, each gatekeeper altered reality slightly by imposing on a neutral apparatus a point of view.
Routine and organizational influences
The routines of this newsroom dictated that all local photographs be published. Furthermore, the publisher's perceptions of racial equity were filtered down through the newsroom, resulting in a staff that did not actively seek to equally represent gender, race, and age. While it is understood a newsroom doesn't always operate as a democracy, the traditions and newsroom standards suggest that news is created and processed by objective journalists. However, as gatekeepers are influenced by personal opinions, norms of the newsroom, and organizational pressures, objectivity is, in some cases, lost.
Forces facilitating news flow
The news processors and news gatherers facilitated each news item's passage from gate to gate. In some cases, this newspaper's news editor, who made photographic assignments, weeded out potential news items she felt didn't warrant a photograph. In other cases, the same news editor would delegate a local photograph to an inside page and run a wire photograph more prominently because she felt the wire photograph was better. The wire editors monitored gates but allowed news items to pass through each gate not based on traditions of newsworthiness or quality but rather by personal opinions about the photographic content. In many cases, photographs of cute children were deemed of higher news value than hard news. The degrees of subjectivity in the newsroom may be inherent in the process, yet the perceptions of photographic storytelling are that the images emulate truth or reality. What these observations and interviews have highlighted are the many layers of subjectivity that lie between a newspaper's photographic content and reality. News personnel who were influenced by various internal and external forces were constructing the proverbial window on the world.
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