Richard Aregood: Image vs. reality

'PROFESSOR" Bernarr Macfadden started his career as a wrestler, body-builder and promoter of a diet based on carrots, nuts and raw eggs. He made his fortune as a publisher who believed that sexual repression was every bit as dangerous as refined sugar, white bread and coffee. His publications specialized in semi-nudes of body-builders and weirdly sexualized magazines like

True Romances

and

True Confessions.

He was also publisher of the New York Evening Graphic, which is credited, or blamed, for the invention of the "composograph," a doctored photo that purported to show actual news. If you were dying to see a photo of Peaches and Daddy Browning in their love nest, the Graphic's cut-and-paste artists would build you one. They even got a shot of Rudolph Valentino entering Paradise.

Macfadden was one of the founders of this newspaper in 1925, which makes a discussion of the use of pictures particularly entertaining.

One reader took exception to a picture that accompanied an editorial on June 30 with this e-mail to yodailynews@gmail.com:

What a scare tactic.

That headline and photograph have to be an all time funny picture.

Gov. Corbett is trying to fix up the mess that Rendell left in the Oval Office/Executive Mansion in Harrisburg and the DN, which I read every day, makes the association that his budget cuts will turn Pennsylvania school kids into colliers.

How absurd.

Show a photograph of a Philly school with kids engaging in carnal acts in the stairwells and beating up their teachers and general pandemonium.

Funny article.

What do you say?

I say using the picture was completely legitimate. The photo of child laborers in the coal mines illustrated an editorial about the governor's policies of cutting education funding while coddling his contributors in the energy industry. Hyperbolic, certainly, but not unfair, if you recognize that the editorial page is the place where opinion should be stated strongly. That photo shouldn't be used to illustrate hard news, in other words, but adds force to an opinion. By the way, the photo carries a vivid emotional charge from not all that long ago in Pennsylvania. My old friend John Morris of the Teamsters Union carried to his grave a right hand mangled as a child coal worker.

The relative merits of the two governors wasn't the subject of the editorial, nor allegations of misbehavior in the schools, although the photos described by the reader aren't ones that any newspaper would ignore.

The reader brings to mind additional questions about the use of illustration, though. News photos are a completely different question. Websites of the right and left seem overly fond of using photos that make their subjects look nuts or evil. When I was at the DN, we frequently spiked pictures that were clearly unfair. One I remember vividly was of Mayor Frank Rizzo. It was shot from a low angle and made him look like a monster in a B movie. It came right from the camera, but it wasn't fair and it never ran in the paper.

Every day, any newspaper makes hundreds of choices. Inevitably, there are some horrible mistakes. "We have run photos we've regretted," said Pat McLoone, the DN managing editor. I remember one such bad call (before Pat took over as managing editor) that layered further agony on an already mourning mother who saw her murdered son's body in the paper.

She was, correctly, pained and outraged. The photo should never have run. Just because you have a picture doesn't mean it should be printed. McLoone remembers a tennis story accompanied by a photo that showed too much of a Williams sister's breast for many readers. He immediately knew the picture was badly chosen and went on Johnny Sample's WHAT talk show to apologize. Not a political apology ("if anyone was offended . . ."), but a real one.

Personally, I could have done without a front page dominated by the more than ample rump of some Kardashian, but maybe that's just me. It's clear, though, that photos that demean or embarrass their subjects are rarely worth publishing. That current philosophy owes a lot to the late Russell Byers, a columnist who said strongly that the Daily News should be fair in photos as well as in words. There was a time when we gave little thought to that, but Russell's argument eventually prevailed.

Technology has provided a tool that Macfadden couldn't have dreamed of - Photoshop. Michael Mercanti, director of photography for the DN and Inquirer, describes a simple but firm rule for using it. "Anything you could do in the darkroom is OK in Photoshop," he said, "things like brightening a section of the image, for instance. But anything that alters or exaggerates is out."

Photo illustrations, like the front page portraying the school superintendent as a toddler, are another matter. "It has to be clearly obvious that it's an illustration, clearly on the goofy side," Mercanti said, adding that it has to be clear to even the dimmest reader that the illustration is exactly that, not reality.

I still wonder what modern photo ethics would think of a decision the Daily News made in 1968 on the death of beloved Phillies coach Benny Bengough.

The only photo in the library was from the locker room. He was stripped to the waist. Artist Ed Masinko, a master of the airbrush, painted a coat and tie on Bengough. Violating the rules was done in the interest of dignity and respect.

It was the right call, I think.

Richard Aregood is the Charles R. Johnson Professor of Journalism at the University of North Dakota.

E-mail him at yodailynews@gmail.com.