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In a study based on in-depth interviews with picture editors
from American media outlets, Meg Spratt (Dart Center research coordinator) and April Peterson found that decisions regarding use of graphic images are rarely made on the basis of
official policies or standards.
Instead, these editors' decisions are
often "based partly on loose journalistic guidelines or on intuition and
the editors' own visceral reactions."
The study, "Choosing Graphic Visuals: How Picture Editors Incorporate Emotion and Personal Experience into Decision Making," appears in the Winter-Spring 2005 edition of Visual Communication Quarterly.
The interviews revealed that many of the editors also drew on their own
experiences of traumatic events to inform their decisions.
The authors note that such hallowed journalistic conventions as "The
Breakfast Test" and "The Dinner Test" rarely offer a cut-and-dried
solution to these questions and can often "lead to complicated
questions."
They also note the apparent shifting of guidelines in recent years to
allow more and more graphic images. One editor tells the authors: "Now
that we live in this world with all these images, all these disasters,
daily difficult-to-look-at images, our collective standard of what is
acceptable has changed."
The study "draws attention to the importance of accepting journalists as emotional beings, and not automatically equating subjectivity with poor editorial decisions," write the authors.
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