International Encyclopedia of Communication Online

Extract

Image ethics has never before been the subject of so much media criticism as at the present time. The use of violent images is questioned. Photographers that hound celebrities beyond propriety are criticized. Pictures that are manipulated and present misleading views damage the media's credibility. Images that perpetuate negative stereotypes of individuals from various multicultural groups are noticed. Pictures that blur the distinction between advertising and journalism undercut journalism's legitimacy. Visual messages can have tremendous emotional impact upon viewers. With proper contextualization, they can serve to inform and educate, as well as entertain and persuade. But used thoughtlessly or superficially, images can also offend, shock, mislead, stereotype, and confuse. The apparent veracity of pictures, the sense in which they seem to simply reflect reality, often obscures the ethical choices involved in their creation. Yet the fact that images routinely employ visual metaphors means that media production is always subject to ethical considerations ( Messaris 1996 ). Visual messages make rhetorical claims about the world, whether intentional or not, as part of →  Journalism , →  advertising , and entertainment, and other fields. Image ethics attempts to foster accountability for visual messages (→  Rhetoric and Visuality ; Ethics of Media Content ; Accountability of the ... log in or subscribe to read full text