Spectacular Trials

This chapter expands on the concept of embodied gatekeeping as it studies the way visual journalists negotiate access to the most newsworthy trials. In the United States, rules for camera access to trials vary state to state. Some states, such as Florida, have opened courtrooms to visual media, while others, such as Pennsylvania, forbid camera-in-the-court coverage. At either end of the spectrum, visual journalists face a maze of rules designed by court officials to protect the dignity of the process. Based on interviews and observational research, this chapter details the way visual journalists have negotiated these rules as they covered several spectacular trials, including Jerry Sandusky’s child sexual assault trial in 2012, George Zimmerman’s trial for the murder of Trayvon Martin in 2013, and Bill Cosby’s sexual assault case in 2017. Each case drew national attention, and each presented journalists with different sets of grounded challenges for visual coverage.

Distributing ethics: Filtering images of death at three news photo desks

This article explores the practices of selecting news images that depict death at a global picture agency, national picture agency and a news magazine. The study is based on ethnographic observations and interviews ( N = 30) from three Western-based news organisations, each representing a link in the complex international news-image circulation process. Further, the organisations form an example of a chain of filters through which most of the news images produced for the global market have to pass before publication. These filters are scrutinised by the empirical case studies that examine the professionals’ ethical reasoning regarding images of violence and death. This research contributes to an understanding of the differences and similarities between media organisations as filters and sheds light on their role in shaping visual coverage. This study concludes that photojournalism professionals’ ethical decision-making is discursively constructed around three frames: (1) shared ethics, (2) relative ethics and (3) distributed ethics. All the organisations share certain similar conceptions of journalism ethics at the level of ideals. On the level of workplace practices and routines, a mixture of practical preconditions, journalism’s self-regulation, business logic and national legislation lead to differences in the image selection practices. It is argued that the ethical decision-making is distributed between – and sometimes even outsourced to – colleagues working in different parts of the filtering chain. Finally, this study suggests that dead or suffering bodies are often invisible in the images of the studied media organisations.

Visual Priming and Framing During the 2020 Democratic Presidential Debates: Electoral Status Predicts Favorable Camera Treatment

The 2020 Democratic presidential primary debates provide a unique opportunity to systematically evaluate network visual production choices in a multicandidate context. The joint decision of the Democratic National Committee and NBC to include an expansive field of twenty contenders through “prime-time” debates on consecutive nights (June 26 and 27, 2019) provided for a natural experiment with equal numbers of top- and second-tier candidates randomly assigned to each night. In this preregistered study, we evaluate whether candidates are treated differently in the amount of camera time they receive (visual priming) and types of camera shots they appear in (visual framing) based on electoral status. We replicate a study of the initial two Democratic and Republican 2016 presidential primary debates for each party and that found the top-two candidates received substantially better visual coverage than all others. We confirm and extend these findings by evaluating different operationalizations of electoral status (top-two, top-tier, stage position, and poll standing). Findings suggest that when visual priming is considered, stage position outperforms other electoral status indicators in terms of explaining variance for total camera and average fixation time. In terms of visual framing, head-and-shoulder “one-shots” are better predicted by top-tier status, whereas public opinion poll standing predicts increased time spent in multiple-candidate shots. Finally, appearances in “two-shots” (side-by-side and split-screen portrayals) were not significantly explained by electoral status, likely due to the paucity of these depictions.