The Importance of Ethics in Visual Media

“Without ethics, man has no future. This is to say, mankind without them cannot be itself. Ethics determine choices and actions and suggest difficult priorities.” -John Berger, The Denial of True Reflection

In my essay I will be discussing how I believe Ethics are extremely important in visual media, in relation to artistic license, and at what point does changing something with your creative freedom become manipulation to the audience viewing it. I will be discussing this with two different forms of visual media, and their corresponding ethical and moral issues. These will be in relation to sensationalism and bias in documentaries and news sources and reporting exaggerating and stretching facts for viewership or personal gain.

Firstly, what is ethics? Ethics or moral philosophy is described as a branch of philosophy that involves systematizing, defending, and recommending concepts of right and wrong conduct. Being ethical in filmmaking would mean being responsible in the content you are creating and realizing the weight and message you have as a storyteller. To be dishonest or blatantly fabricate facts would be considered by many to be morally reprehensible. There is a grey area to this however, and that would be in the case of artistic license. Artistic license is a term, sometimes a euphemism, used to denote the distortion of fact, alteration of the conventions of grammar or language. To quote John Knoll, chief creative conductor at Industrial Light and Magic “Any tool can be used for good and bad, it’s really the ethics or the artist using it”

Examples I would give where I feel artistic license is used most, and in the most questionable fashion would be in documentary filmmaking. It seems recently I have seen this so often that a lot of the time the documentary I’m watching could easily fall into fiction due to the distortion of fact and biased narrative. For example, one of the greatest documentaries to display rivalry in the strangest of places was “The King of Kong, A Fistful of Quarters”. From the beginning this documentary only works on a fundamental level because it had a compelling villain. It followed the “hero”, Steve Wiebe’s journey from his initial struggle, success, fall and redemption, and we the audience are always privy to root for the underdog.

The King of Kong is sliced together in such a way that you have two sides, good and bad: Steve Wiebe, the downtrodden victim of repeated personal failure, and Billy Mitchell, an established Donkey Kong player with the highest score and a hot sauce magnate. The little guy versus the establishment. To quote Billy himself, 'If I have all this good fortune, if everything's rolling my way, if all these balls have bounced in my favor, there's some poor bastard out there who's getting the screws put to him.' Billy is the character that gets vilified in this scenario and it works perfectly. It’s cleverly cut in such a way that we get these unbelievable quotes and heroic redemption arcs. Truly I believe it can be said that if this film were just about video games, no one would watch it, or at the very least enjoy it. However, when you start to use a bit of artistic license, create some drama and action it becomes much more compelling.

Is this ethical is the real question? I would say for a documentary to create bias like this is questionable in itself, however when it has real world consequences then I would say that is unethical and morally disagreeable. And in the case of Billy Mitchell it definitely went on to affect his life and reputation. For example, a character similar to Mitchell called Garrett Bobby Ferguson (GBF) appears in Regular Show. Mitchell, however, took offense at the portrayal (a villain who cheats at video games) and filed a lawsuit, which was thrown out by the judge. In the 2015 feature film Pixels, Peter Dinklage plays former video game champion 'Eddie', with physical appearance and personality styled after Mitchell and other gamers. It seems he has a difficult time now even years later shaking off the persona that the film gave him. And this is only one example, there are other more obvious and much more egregious examples of artistic license used in documentaries, with more notable ones such as “Super-Size Me” where Morgan Spurlock followed a strictly McDonalds based diet for 30 days, which results in a 13% body mass increase, increased cholesterol, mood swings, sexual dysfunction, and fat accumulation in his liver.

Critically acclaimed at first it was later decided that it was an unfair experiment, considering factors like Spurlock consistently ate past the point of fullness, supersized the majority of his meals (a practice that has been removed from McDonalds) and blatantly ignored his nutritionist's advice. It was suggested that the nutrition in the film didn’t add up, and it showed that Spurlock ate nearly 30 pounds of sugar throughout the 30 days which would naturally result in huge weight gain. Most agree it was a publicity stunt at best, and that it would have been much more interesting to see how healthy a diet could be maintained on the McDonalds menu. To quote The New York Times, A.O Scott, “Using himself as an experimental subject, represents an entertaining, and occasionally horrifying, statement of the obvious.”

One of the most severe and unethical examples I could find from a documentary viewpoint would be “The Greater Good”, which only came to my attention recently and is extremely topical now. The Greater Good purports to be a film that provides a balanced look at the benefits and risks of vaccines. It is nothing of the sort. It is antivaccine propaganda that uses emotionally manipulative anecdotes to promote pseudoscience. Vaccines are so important for herd immunity. “Vaccines save lives; fear endangers them. It's a simple message parents need to keep hearing.” - Jeffrey Kluger, author of Splendid Solutions.

The greater good provides heart-wrenching stories of suffering, and one has suffered through the death of a baby. It’s impossible to not feel the tragedy this family has gone through. The filmmakers clearly know this and take full advantage by emotionally manipulating the audience. It gives the pretense of “balance” by including prominent pro-vaccine scientists, but in the end, it is very clear where the message of the movie lies and is very much on the side of protect your own children from vaccines, by not protecting everyone else's. It is this example that shows me how unethical visual media can be, and documentaries are like animation in the sense that it is extremely powerful and has the power to sway people, like propaganda.

Another example of visual media using artistic license in an unethical manner would be news sources. A type of media that is supposed to give just exclusively facts has become distrusted by viewers due to many examples of dramatization and changing of facts for sensationalism. Is it acceptable for news sources to use artistic license when reporting? I believe reporters are supposed to cover news, not shape it. “If you don't read the newspaper, you're uninformed. If you read the newspaper, you're mis-informed.” - Mark Twain. It can start as something seemingly harmless, like when administration official Gavin J. Smith made a claim that CNN reporter Anderson Cooper was exaggerating flood levels during Hurricane Florence coverage. A photo was tweeted of Cooper standing in water, waist deep, while his camera crew in front are only standing in a shallow pool. Immediately social media was rife with accusations, and the following day, Trump Jr. claimed CNN’s ratings are down 41% and that the network is lying to make President Donald Trump look bad. The hashtag fake news trended for days. It was later revealed that the photo wasn't even from Hurrican Florence, but 10 years previous from Hurrican Ike. Anderson Cooper explains that he was standing in the depths to stay out of the way of vehicles and rescuers. A simple claim spiraled so much that Cooper had to take ten minutes of his show to debunk any claims.

Another example of false news reporting is the 'You didn't build that' scandal. It is a phrase from an 2012 election campaign speech delivered by United States President Barack Obama on July 13, 2012, in Roanoke, Virginia. The sentence 'If you've got a business—you didn't build that' was publicized by his political opponents during the 2012 presidential campaign, as an attack by Obama on business and entrepreneurs. The Obama campaign responded that the criticisms were taking the phrase out of context, and the word “that” in the phrase was referring to the construction of roads and bridges in a previous sentence. Fact-checking organizations reported that Obama's remarks were used out of context in order to criticize the president. The president's remarks reflected the belief, common among Democrats, that successful citizens owed their success partly to public infrastructure and government spending, and that they should contribute to finance public goods. Something seemingly harmless when taken out of context could ruin a person's reputation or career. It hit Obamas campaign hard enough that conservative commentators used it as fuel for weeks after.

My final example of unethical new sources is surrounding Alex Jones and the news coverage of the tragic Sandy Hook school shooting. In September 2014, conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, who runs the website InfoWars, which had previously claimed that the murders were a 'false flag' attack perpetrated by the government, made a new conspiracy claim that 'no one died' at Sandy Hook Elementary School because the Uniform Crime Reports showed no murders in Newtown for 2012, and that the victims were 'child actors.” Alex Jones is now very much labeled as a conspiracy theorist but previously he had somewhat of a viable reputation as a news source given that Trump had appeared on Infowars during his presidential campaign and lavished praise on its presenter, saying that the conspiracy theorist had an 'amazing' reputation and pledging not to let him down. And over the last several decades Jones has emerged as a notoriously inflammatory pundit with a considerable platform and following. At its height, his three-hour daily radio show was syndicated to more than 160 stations across the US, while his website InfoWars peddled endless conspiracy theories.

“While the internet has led to the promotion of important voices we might not have otherwise heard, the last decade has demonstrated with searing clarity that this idea has far more powerfully contributed to the amplification of lies, manipulation, and an epistemological collapse that has deformed human discourse and undermined the very notion of truth.” -Laura Hudson. His brand of insanity had a scarily large following, so much so that a lawsuit has been filed by families of the Sandy Hook victims. This lawsuit, which was filed in Texas, where InfoWars is based, is just one of multiple defamation suits filed against Jones. The plaintiffs of this case include Leonard Posner and Veronique De La Rosa, who say that as a result of Jones’ claims, their family was harassed and forced to move. Jones has previously implied that De La Rosa was paid to pretend she was grieving her six-year-old son’s death. Six other families of Sandy Hook victims filed suit against Jones in Connecticut in April.

Alex Jones’ news reporting provides a textbook example of how misinformation gains traction and spreads. Repeat a lie often enough, and you may start believing it as truth. The danger of journalism and news coverage is in the mouth of the person giving it. Psychological science consistently finds when a lie gets repeated, it’s slightly more likely to be misremembered as truth. It’s called the “illusory truth effect.” Given how much media coverage occurs in a given day, one could say that ethical violations are encouragingly rare. But they do happen, and therein lies the biggest issue. Where there is room for interpretation, there is room for bias and human error.

I conclude that Media Platforms have an ethical duty to its audience to provide transparency and honesty in its reporting. For a source to be reputable it needs to provide unbiased and straightforward information, with no motive for personal gain. I believe a lot of these media sources have become tainted in a sense. It is very important for the public to be exposed to both sides of an argument or discussion in order to be able to make well-informed decisions. I fear that somewhere along the way, news agencies on both sides have crossed the line between news and entertainment. The free press has a great responsibility to the people to provide news that is, at the minimum, true. The effects of a distortion of this mission cannot be overestimated.

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