Film Challenge #6

The manipulation done by Conrad Brean and Stanley Motss was an extreme scenario of how the media can shape our views and make us believe things that aren’t even true. They used the power of the media to create a fake war and distract Americans from the president’s sex scandal. None of them seemed to be bothered by the enormous lie they had formed. They saw it is the only way to do their job and help the president get re-elected. There wasn’t much concern about the ethical issues among the main characters, so could this be something that’s acceptable for people of power to do with the media?

What made the fake war seem so real was the manipulators’ ability to create actual events for people to see. Seeing footage from a war was not uncommon at the time. People who saw it just assumed it was real because it was on a news channel. Similarly, we saw an example of this in class when CNN televised a fake newscast of Carl Rochelle from the First Gulf War. Today we can tell that it’s fake, but back then, people may not have known about media manipulation or didn’t think that someone would actually do it. The movie’s manipulation was worse because that war didn’t even exist.

Brean and Motss were both manipulating the media for their own reasons. They believed that they had a job to do. Brean always treated the situation as if it was a task he needed to complete. He was hired by the White House to distract the American public, so that is what he set out to do, no question asked. Motss joined the team because he wanted to show what he could do as a producer. He set out to prove that he could make the war with Albania seem so real on camera that people would actually believe it. He also wanted some overdue credit for his work since he had never won any awards for his past movies.

While they had their own reasons that they thought were justified, what Brean and Motss did was wrong. The SPJ Code of Ethics states that journalists should “never deliberately distort facts or context, including visual information. Clearly label illustrations and re-enactments.” Every piece of evidence of the “war” in Albania was done in a studio or faked. While they weren’t journalists themselves, they were controlling what was given to the media and distributed across the country while knowing that they were lying. Not only were they disobeying the rules of journalism, but they were also doing so to help keep a man in office that had a sex scandal. They infringed on the people’s ability to see who their president was and distracted them from what he had done.

Brean and Motss should never have manipulated the media to get the president re-elected. It didn’t allow the people to make in an informed decision on who they wanted running their country and lied to them completely, which is the opposite of the media’s real purpose. A story like this shows how deceiving the media can really be and instills a lack of trust among the population. It’s hard for people to tell what’s real anymore when the media that they rely on for news is being used to manipulate them into believing what a higher power wants them to. How can people 100 percent trust the media anymore, especially around election time?

Sources

Wag the Dog

http://www.spj.org/ethicscode.asp

https://twitter.com/search?f=realtime&q=%23medialawmovies&src=typd

Film Challenge #5

Ron Galella had an enormous impact on photojournalism and the role and perception of the paparazzi. His methods for obtaining quality photographs were uncanny, intrusive, and different from what anyone else was doing before him. Some people claimed that he was a nuisance and a creep, while others praise him because of the magnificent moments he captured, like his very famous photo of Jackie Kennedy Onassis with her hair blowing in the wind. So was it wrong for Galella to stalk these celebrities and invade their lives just to get candid pictures of them and sell them to magazines? Or was what he did actually okay?

Back in the 1960s, Ron Galella was one of a kind. There wasn’t an entire paparazzi culture that stalked the streets of New York and Los Angeles yet. He was known as they crazy guy who followed people around, which made him a target for criticism. His pictures got a lot of heat because of when he took them. Photos like the Falling Man from September 11th or the fireman holding the dying baby are seen as unethical and revealing because they show people when they are very vulnerable and can be openly identified and judged. While Galella’s photos weren’t graphic or disturbing, they were still controversial because he would sneak into venues or hide in places just to snap a “money shot”.

Many celebrities felt as if they were harassed by Galella. He would stake out in front of their houses, follow them in cars, and hide behind bushes and corners. While most of his pictures were taken in public, he was taking pictures of people in times that they felt like should be private, such as Jackie O playing with her son or Audrey Hepburn walking to a car in her driveway. The SPJ Code of Ethics states that we should “balance the public’s need for information against potential harm or discomfort.” The frequency of his actions made his subjects uneasy. He intentionally was pushing the boundaries of private and public for newsworthy pictures and it made people uncomfortable.

While what he did was unconventional and disruptive, Galella actually snapped hundreds upon thousands of great pictures. He felt as if he was just entertaining the public by showing them how celebrities lived. Andy Warhol was quoted saying “My idea of a good picture is one that’s in focus and of a famous person doing something unfamous…That’s why my favorite photographer is Ron Galella”. He helped show the world that celebrities were people too, and the only way to capture their true selves was to catch them off guard or in a place they felt safe. He thought he was doing us all a favor and acted very innocent.

I don’t think that Ron Galella’s style of photojournalism is very acceptable. Getting a great picture is not as important as respecting the privacy and comfort of people, whether they be in the public eye or not. The Code of Ethics says to minimize harm, and that means that you must try to be as least obtrusive as you possibly can, which he never did. His style is an extreme form of photojournalism and it really turned people off to the idea of the paparazzi. Those kinds of photographers are not and will never be as respected as other kinds of journalists or photojournalists because of Galella.

Sources

Smash His Camera

http://www.spj.org/ethicscode.asp

https://storify.com/nicole_kraft/media-law-and-ethics-in-film-comm-3404 (Lecture Slides)