Their have been a lot of controversial ethical things done in photojournalism. It is something that happens all the time. One example is how when O.J. Simpson got was arrested for the murder of his wife a picture of him was altered. This was a huge deal because it was on the cover of a major magazine. The magazine that altered the photo was TIME magazine. This become very clear when Newsweek magazine published the real photo. The photo was of O.J.’s mugshot from when he was arrest. TIME magazine edited the photo so that “Simpson's face as darker, blurrier, and unshaven”. The unedited photo published by Newsweek looked completely different, it was much brighter, clear and he was clean shaven.
Source- http://franklinavenue.blogspot.com/2014/12/what-ever-happened-to-newsweek.html
Year- 1994
This is the unedited photo.
TIME magazine got caught because Newsweek published the real photo in the cover of their magazine. This brought a lot of scrutiny for TIME magazine. The photographer who edited the photo said he "wanted to make it more artful, more compelling”. The editor James Gaines said "The harshness of the mug shot—the merciless bright light, the stubble on Simpson's face, the cold specificity of the picture—had been subtly smoothed and shaped into an icon of tragedy. The expression on his face was not merely blank now; it was bottomless." Some people said that the edit made the photo look racist. This did not make TIME magazine look good at all. The real photo is much different from the edited one. Time has ethically is not supposed to edit photos.
Year -1994
Source- http://content.time.com/time/covers/0,16641,19940627,00.html
This is the edited photo.
I think that what TIME magazine did is very unethical. They should not have altered that photo at all. The edits made him look completely different and it made him look bad. In my opinion they made him look guilty by doing the edit. I can defiantly see how people could see that this as TIME magazine being racist. The edit made O.J. look really bad. It is almost like they tried to make him look like a criminal and as if he was in bad shape. TIME edited this photo when it really was not necessary at all. The photo would have been perfectly fine without the edit. Ethically I feel like they crossed a line.
Loyalty is a big thing for me, so I feel that TIME should be loyal to its readers and not edit things to taint there views. Trust is another big thing to me. TIME magazines readers trust that they are getting real news unedited and unbiased. They broke that trust when they edited that photo. If I was in charge I would not have edited that photo at all. I most definitely would have not published the edited photo if I was the editor. They made O.J. look like he was sick or there was something wrong with him. It is not ethical to distort someones health like that. It was not fair for O.J.’s family and friends to have to see him like that, when that is not how he actually looked. Whether he was innocent or guilty does not matter they ethically crossed a line. It was not right to try to influence people by altering photos just to see magazines. Morally this was very wrong and ethically just wrong.
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