I have been very fortunate to have the opportunity to interview several people I admire, or find interesting but Wednesday I was excited and nervous to speak to my latest guest. It’s one thing to speak to journalists or other bloggers but another to speak to someone who teaches journalism.

Dr. David Perlmutter a Professor and the Associate Dean for Graduate Studies and Research at William Allen White School of Journalism and Mass Communications at the University of Kansas was my guest and had some very interesting things to say about his profession and many of the ongoing criticisms coming from the blogosphere. The Professor did his profession proud with some very forthright answers and valid defenses.

I hope I did the same representing my fellow bloggers. Here is my interview with Professor David Perlmutter:
TUA: Professor Perlmutter do you mind if I just call you David or Professor? I know I will mess it up if I say your name over and over again.

DDP: David is fine. Yes that’s fine.

TUA: Professor you received a lot of attention and respect from the blogosphere for your article titled photojournalism in crises back on August 16th in Editor & Publisher. If you don’t mind I would like to start by reading a portion of that article.

I’m not sure, however, if the craft I love is being murdered, committing suicide, or both.

Perhaps it would be more reassuring if the enemy at the gates was a familiar one—politicians, or maybe radio talk show hosts. But the photojournalist standing on the crumbling ramparts of her once proud citadel now sees the vandal army charging for the sack led by “zombietime,” “The Jawa Report,” “Powerline,” “Little Green Footballs,” “confederateyankee,” and many others.

In each case, these bloggers have engaged in the kind of probing, contextual, fact-based (if occasionally speculative) media criticism I have always asked of my students. And the results have been devastating: news photos and video shown to be miscaptioned, radically altered, or staged (and worse, re-staged) for the camera. Surely “green helmet guy,” “double smoke,” “the missiles that were actually flares,” “the wedding mannequin from nowhere,” the “magical burning Koran,” the “little girl who actually fell off a swing” and “keep filming!” will now enter the pantheon of shame of photojournalism.

Professor that’s some pretty high praise for bloggers some of them friends of mine and some pretty condemning statements of I guess colleagues of yours, I take it you think that at least some of the criticisms bloggers level at journalists are warranted.

DDP: yes and let me put that in context. Of course one column is not a blog. In fact I just finished writing a book about blogs. In the beginning of the book I talk about how different a book and a blog is. Where a blog is and endlessly revised and extended conversation where if you write a column or a book its sort of there forever and shouldn’t be subject to alteration afterwards (chuckling).

And so a lot of what I said there was in brief and trying to sum up some sort of larger contentions and discussions and so maybe in the reading of it, it sounds a little more pointed and terse than I really meant it to be. But I would say the following; if I teach a class where I ask students to look at a particular photo story or some video story in the news, I want them to speculate. I want them to ask questions. Now wait a minute why in this picture is the hole in the ambulance like this and in this picture it’s like that. And wait a minute didn’t I see this guy in another previous image from AP on some other story. Now none of these questions may lead to the uncovering of either malice or accidental misplacement of the truth shall we put it that way. But I think it’s important to engage in that speculation. What we do with that speculation and to what extent you say that you found for example definitively some photo fakery, now that’s another question. I personally and maybe this is my bias as someone who teaches at a journalism school. I would give the photographers the benefit of the doubt.

If you are saying that somebody has done something bad you have to prove they have done something bad rather than they have to prove that they are innocent. I think that is an American Principle that I hope most people would agree with.

Certainly there some people in organizations out there you know the pre-war Iraqi minister of truth I would on instinct think that most of what they are saying are lies. But I don’t think we are at the point yet where we should be saying that everything coming out of Reuters or everything coming out of the AP is a lie and it’s up to them to prove it’s true. So yes what the bloggers were doing with the photo and video from the Lebanon Hezbollah Israeli war was very very good. Very very useful. Should be emulated but I wouldn’t want to get into a condition again as I said at the end of the piece where we just automatically assumed everything that arrived to us visually in the news stream was a concoction.

TUA: I appreciate that and you had actually written a comment to me (I was railing against journalists as I do so often), your comment to me was not to shoot the messenger and pointing out that there are lots of if not the majority of journalists and photo journalists who are ethical and professional people. But I would like to follow up on something you said. You said that we should naturally assume that they are innocent until proven guilty, but you also said that you would be skeptical, of anything the Iraqi interior minister said. Isn’t there a point where you develop a history, a company or a particular journalist develops a history of things that are proven to be falsely reported, then isn’t it right for maybe not to assume that they are falsely reporting but at least be skeptical of what they are reporting.

DDP: Yes I think you have pretty much summarized the correct position to have there. There are journalists out there, there are news organizations that who if I gave grades to on truth value, and fairness accuracy, objectivity, whatever we what to call it they would get F’s and there are other ones who I think would get A’s. Now I say that based on not being systematic about it. In other words lets take the photographer who did the Beirut skyline double smoke image.

TUA: Right

DDP: As I understand it there were some 920 plus photos that were in the Reuters archive that were credited to him. You know it may very well have been that those were the one or two photos that he screwed around with. I would actually doubt that he, nobody would have the time. (Chuckling) It actually takes a little time to do this. I don’t know if you use Photoshop; but you can’t just do this with one click. To make a passable fake you have to work on the picture a little bit. So I am willing to bet that he didn’t fake every single image. On the other hand you can’t be a little bit pregnant. And that is really the standard that we have to hold journalists to. That is the standard that their organizations should be holding them to.

I did want to point this out in the article; before the standard was no standard. In the 19th century there was no standard to faking. Most of the civil war photographs you see to some extent today would be problematic to publish in a newspaper because they were rearranging stuff and posing people all the time. That was what photojournalism was in the late 19th century. Today one fake and that is or should be the end of your career out of 20,000 pictures you take. Some people within photojournalism raise some issues about that but generally that’s accepted. I think by the way that shows a level of ethical principal that should be praised is that If you are outed for an actual and we can talk about different kinds of fakery, there is the fakery of manipulation of Photoshop, and then there is; I think it’s a version of fakery if you are driving your jeep along and some people from Hezbollah come out and say ok could you take a picture of that for us and Ill pose this way and I’ll be standing this way and here let me go grab this and put it in the image. I mean that’s fakery too; as far as I’m concerned. But in terms of actually manipulating a photograph to create a Lebanon of the double smoke image well they get fired. And we should say that’s to the credit of the industry that they are doing that.

TUA: Well I can tell right now that I am going to have so many more questions for you that we won’t have time for now but let’s step back and go to Reuters and the issue of the double smoke photograph and I believe it was the same journalist who had multiple flares that he Photoshopped in and called them missiles instead of flares. First of all how could the editors at Reuters miss that obvious fakery and amateur journalist, bloggers catch it so easily?

Is it that they are overworked? Or they’re incompetent? Or intentionally let it go by? I know that’s speculation but how would you explain it?

DDP: Ok and again maybe I have a naiveté that sounds breathtaking to your readers but I think that most editors working at most newspapers, magazines, television, and wire services would never allow an intentionally physically faked image to get out there if they knew it was happening. That’s the base line I start out with and somebody will have to prove to me that editor so and so said ahh this is fake what the hell let’s put it out there. That said another factor that you just mentioned if you are sitting there at the AP just watching the photo stream coming by and all these images are coming in you may very well may have in a hot news story like lets say a war, you are having literally tens of thousands of photographs being produced in a very very short time. And digitization of course has many blessings but one of the curses of digitization if people are shooting a lot of stuff and just sending it out there and just flooding through. And so I guess this would be another defense, and I don’t consider myself a professional defender of the virtue of photojournalism but yeah they have a lot of things to pay attention to. I think a lot of these fake photos that are easily spottable in retrospect, are not for example the double smoke and the missile. It took me a while I don’t think it’s as obvious; it’s like those illusion 3D images where when you look at them one way you see one image and then all the sudden you notice another image underneath. It took me ten, fifteen seconds and then I said Oh yeah obviously these two columns of smoke are identical columns and he just took one and moved it over but as I was flipping through the newspaper and I guess I am pretty good at this stuff; I didn’t instantly notice it.

The one that happened early in the Iraq war where the Los Angeles times photographer who was fired for creating a composite image from two photos that one was a little bit more strange but that got into the photo stream.

So I guess that’s my soft defense of what’s going on. I don’t know of anyone and maybe they are out there and maybe you can prove it that are intentionally letting stuff get out that’s fake. A lot of stuff is going through and they aren’t so radically noticeable that you can think any idiot would have instantly seen it going through the photo stream.

TUA: Well you mentioned something else a little bit later on in the piece and this goes a little bit to your last answer and it covers something else I would like to talk about. You say it does not help that certain news organizations have acted like government officials or corporate officers trying to squash a scandal; and isn’t that how Reuters reacted instead of making all of Mr. I believe Adnan Hajj was his name all of his photos public, to public scrutiny and we could all look over them and determine if any others were fake?

They just took them away and said “oh those were the only two trust us”.

DDP: yes well you and I are in complete agreement and I can’t believe that we’re in a business that demands transparency and accountability and frankly instant access you know the old joke that “I called the mayors office at Midnight on Sunday and no one was available for comment” type of thing. We demand that in the journalism business of everybody else and we have to provide it to others.

TUA: right, and another thing. You mentioned green helmet guy specifically, made famous from the supposed Qana massacre and of course from the good work of bloggers in my opinion found that this wasn’t the first time that he was caught at a supposed massacre and again carrying dead children around. Have you read either of the Associated Press’s Iranian Bureau chief Kathy Gannon’s columns on the man known as Green Helmet?

DDP: No I have not.

TUA: Well I will send them to you and I would like to ask you about them later but I would characterize the tone of both articles as glowing praise for a misunderstood civil servant. I guess I will ask another question, to my knowledge not one major news organization actually investigated the claims that bloggers made about the Qana massacre. About the death toll, about the staging of dead children, about Green helmet directing film crews. There was one German news organization but it was completely ignored by the American press. Can you explain why they were so completely incurious about what happened and why none of them, I would think it would be a major story for some news organization to prove that Hezbollah was committing propaganda either knowingly or unknowingly with the help of the American press?

DDP: You are correct (laughing) in every way; as far as I know. I can tell you what I believe are the reasons why all of that occurred but it doesn’t actually solve the problem. The reasons in brief are the natural tendency of all human beings when we are attacked to be defensive. Organizations do it exponentially. Especially organizations where people are afraid; they’re are afraid of outside criticism. I would say obviously the part that has to do with bloggers is the idea that “hey your not part of the gang”. It’s ok for people in our gang to be critical of each other. If that of criticism had been coming from an episode of Reliable Sources or a media critic for the Washington Post, it would have been treated very differently.

Obviously I was trying to be humorous when I was talking about a vandal army but that is the perspective of many professional journalists. Which is Ironic of course because a lot of professional journalists are “blogging up”. You know many main stream organizations have blogs and are asking their journalists to blog.

TUA: and they view themselves as the ones for exposing the emperor for having no clothes.

DDP: yeah and as I said that’s the problem that we have, that we tend to apply almost impossible standards to people in corporations outside of the media, we tend to apply very high standards to government officials, everybody and we seem to get really defensive about applying those same standards to ourselves.

I believe the lesson that we have learned from many corporate and government scandals in fact if you go to a good PR firm is that they will tell you what works best is candor. Is to look like you are saying maybe there is a problem. We are going to look into this we are going to solve this we are going to be open and transparent about what we do. By the way I think that works best for politicians with the American people. I would think that news organizations would figure out that that’s what they need to do too. Especially when you see these surveys over and over. It’s ironic one of the biggest problems with journalism is the erosion credibility and authority of journalism and yet journalists here they are acting frankly like politicians trying to hide a scandal and they are wondering why is their credibility decreasing.

TUA: Obviously there is a monetary aspect. Newspapers have been loosing readership for a long time, and now network news is loosing viewer ship and blogs although not at the same level by any means is gaining readership. I’m sure they feel threatened monetarily. That’s their business. They are in business to make money first of all.

DDP: Yes and let’s not just talk about it in the corporate sense a lot of journalists are losing their jobs. Newspapers are cutting back. I was just at a journalism convention of journalism educators and somebody put up a job search board on a major media organization and out of the 100 jobs up there none of them were reporter or editor. They were like web platform manager and things like that. The number of people being employed as reporters and editors, it is getting very tight in that market. There is a lot of fear. There is a lot of nervousness. There’s a lot of uncertainty about these great changes. You have more people I believe this is the case, more people reading MySpace, and Facebook than all the print newspapers of America combined. At times of uncertainty also tend to be the most violent times.

TUA: professor Perlmutter I know you have to go; I wanted to get the name of your book in here. You said you just wrote a book on blogging what is the name of it and when is it coming out.

DDP: the name of the book is BlogWars: The New Political Battleground. It coming out through Oxford University press and it is scheduled to come out a thousand years from now in April 2007.

TUA: (Laughing) Well we will definitely be looking forward to it.

DDP: In blogging that really is like the next millennium.

TUA: And I’m sure it will be available at Amazon.com and other places when it comes out?

DDP: Yes it will. It makes a great Easter gift.

End of interview.

By the way the Professor has a blog of his own. Be sure to visit PolicyByBlog for some more interesting observations and commentary.

Related posts:

Bloggers get their due