J103-Reading Analysis-8/10: Photojournalism and the Tabloid Press; 7th Nov 2006

This essay sets out clearly the tensions between quality and tabloid journalism from the perspective of photography. Karin Becker uses the history of photography and it’s use in journalism to explain what use it has and how that use is abused. She shows clearly that through the development of photojournalism, the reluctance among the quality press to pick it up and its immediate use among the popular press, photojournalism has come to mean something very clear in the mind of the industry.
The idea that photography degrades the value of “verbal forms of journalistic practice” is consistent all the way through the essay and forms the basis of her major conclusions.
Becker’s argument that I agree with most, the one that is articulated the best in this essay is that the tabloid press uses the photojournalism as a means, above all, to sell their paper. This, in Becker’s eyes represents a “deconstruction of both the seamless and transparent character of news and the ideal of an unbiased and uniform professionalism.” Becker makes this contradiction that this fact creates very clear right from the beginning of the essay. She explains that from the start the photographic medium “could have been the foundation for treating photographs as news by institutions whose credibility rests on the facility and accuracy of their reports about the world.”
What Becker says (as many philosophers do) is that a photograph can be doctored to produce a different reaction. There is no limit to the amount an image can be changed and therefore is never something that can be relied upon in entirety. Becker says that this changing of images is now so fundamental to tabloid photojournalism that images held within tabloids pages do the complete opposite of what photography represented in the beginning. She says that photojournalism in tabloids is used to adapt or even hide the truth from the readership, to make it more emotionally stirring, to make it more sensationalised.
Becker uses the example of “The execution of Ruth Snyder, found guilty of murdering her husband after a much publicised ‘love triangle’ trial in 1928” and the exploits of The Evening Graphic during a high profile divorce trial in New York around the same time to illustrate how little morality was exercised during this historical period of tabloid journalism. Becker uses the sources well and is able herself to stir emotions within at least one reader: me.
This could be argued is the biggest flaw in Becker’s essay. Although she uses the sources well to illustrate her points, it is the limited field from which these sources come that is debatable. There is no doubt that at the turn of the last century and for the three decades after, the changes within the popular press were vast and inextricably linked with the rise of photojournalism. But surely there has been a reappraisal of everything photography adds to journalism in the past twenty years. It is this temporal limitation that seems to limit Becker’s essay, but with the sources she uses and the conclusions she makes this piece is very useful to understand the rise and limitations of photojournalism as we know it.