Audio ethics
Posted on June 7, 2007 by Melissa Worden
I met with photographers at my paper last night as they all gathered to talk about their photos. The discussion several times moved to how they could turn their projects into online audio slideshows/galleries/projects, which is so great for a multimedia editor to hear.
An interesting debate came up at the end of the night: What are the ethical guidelines to editing audio?
These are some issues they wondered about:
>> Do the photos and audio HAVE to match in time? For instance, if you record a prayer one night when you’re visiting a church group but you get the best photos the second week you visit that same group, is it OK to use that original recording?
>> If something rattles loudly in the background while recording, or the person you’re interviewing gets caught in a coughing fit, can you ask them to repeat themselves?
>> Is it OK to leave background sounds in the background, even if those sounds weren’t occurring when the interview happened?
Herald-Tribune Director of Photography Mike Lang found this link to the Radio-Television News Directors Association (RTNDA) Code of Ethics. One section says:
“TRUTH: Professional electronic journalists should pursue truth aggressively and present the news accurately, in context, and as completely as possible.
Professional electronic journalists should:
* Continuously seek the truth.
* Resist distortions that obscure the importance of events.
* Clearly disclose the origin of information and label all material provided by outsiders.Professional electronic journalists should not:
* Report anything known to be false.
* Manipulate images or sounds in any way that is misleading.
* Plagiarize.
* Present images or sounds that are reenacted without informing the public.”
I searched today to see if there are any ethical guidelines for sound. I found a slideshow tip sheet put together by Josh Meltzer, of The Roanoke Times, and Scott Sharpe, of the News & Observer. It has some great tips about how to get the interview, including the following:
“Transfer good photojournalism ethics to recording audio
o NEVER ask a subject to do something or say something
o NEVER edit your project in such a way that is no longer accurate to what you observed
o Indicate who is talking when needed
o NEVER edit someone’s words to make them say something with a different meaning from what they actually said”
At the bottom of the page, someone asked exactly what we were wondering last night:
“It’s a given not to ask a subject to do something or say something for you, but, can you ask them to repeat something if someone sneezed or something distracting happenend in the background. Comment by Jeff — June 5, 2007 @ 10:26 am”
Obviously we’re not alone in this debate/questioning. Any advice from anyone out there?
Tags: audio slideshows, audio podcasts
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We had a really fascinating ethics discussion at the NPPA multimedia summit. I don’t think any hard and fast rules were made, but it was lively. Listen here: http://www.nppasummit.com/immersion/2007/05/31/panel-on-ethics-in-multimedia/
Also, an article from Al Tompkins at Poynter aimed at TV folks might be relevant: http://poynter.org/content/content_view.asp?id=3380
Hi, Melissa. I tried to send you a trackback, but I got an error message. I linked to this post and added a list of advice I give to journalism students who are just starting out with audio.
Regina & Mindy,
Thanks so much for the tips and links. Very helpful. I’ll share them with the staff here.
(Here’s the link back to Mindy’s post to read more.)
When I first began producing radio I was astonished at how easy it would be to use audio to deceive. It’s just as easy to cut the word “not” from a sentence as it is to cut “um” or “er.”
But it’s fairly obvious that you don’t want to do anything that will change the meaning of what was said from “I did not have sexual relations…” to “I did have…”
It can feel like a lot of pressure sometimes, having to decide whether you’re changing the meaning of what the speaker said. But if you’ve only got 15 seconds to get their point across and they took 30 seconds to make a statement, you need to find something to cut.
Most often that means cutting the beginning or end of a quote and scripting the part that goes into it. Sometimes if you’re producing slideshows with no narration except that provided by the speaker it can also mean using the second response to your question, or in some cases editing out the part of the sentence where the speaker get sidetracked.
I’ve heard a couple of people instruct people they were interviewing - “When I ask you a question, please answer in a complete sentence, i.e. - if I ask you “who was there?” you would say “john and becky where there” or “why does that matter?” you’d say “this matters because …” this was mainly for a video piece.
I don’t think there’s anything ethically wrong with trying to get decent audio - as long as you are not distorting the truth - the question is: is getting someone to state something in the form of a statement a “distortion” of the truth. I wonder what the NPR people do with this stuff?
In an interview, I think it’s reasonable to ask a question more than once, in different ways perhaps. Or even to say, “Explain to me again how you did this…”
There’s a fine line between asking someone to demonstrate something again, which is presented in that way, and setting up a scene. An interview is about sharpening the answers, which is effective, but we should guard against stopping the action for a do-over, unless it’s clearly a demonstration.
Also, if I were timeshifting the audio and images from one day or week to the next, I’d be concerned that even something innocuous would look fake to someone who participtated. As in, “I was sitting next to Mrs. Smith wearing the red hat when I hit that note in choir, not when I was next to Mrs. Jones the next week.”
It might be interesting to use the online capacity to present the sharply edited, efficient storytelling, while also offering the raw footage for anyone who wants to see what you were up to.
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