I'm no Obama supporter, but that's a darned good crowd. I don't think the photographer did anything underhanded or anything. I used a telephoto to flatten the crowd and cropped to cut out the dead part of the stadium steps, etc. I'll admit I get aggravated when photographers stage eight people together and crop tight to make it look like a big crowd, but 80,000 is a heck of a crowd. All they did was record it dramatically.
Drama and accuracy are two different animals. If you are trying to sell shots showing lots of people and their team (or voters and their messiah) then you present them in their most favorable light. If you are trying to report ACCURATELY on an event, you don't selectively edit your image to make it appear that it is something it is not. Everyone has an idea of the relative capacity of a stadium. It provides scope and scale to reference a crowd against. A limitless sea of people provides no such scale, no horizons or boundaries. Even in Texas stadiums do not extend to infinity. Nor in Portland do Obama rallies. AP (& the photo editors) are telling a story that is not there. Playing fast & loose with numbers is an old canard (think 'Million Man March') and is a ploy to disillusion opposition. And like negative advertising, it works (sadly). Take a look at the weekend news photo leads and compare those of Obama with those of Clinton. Similar delegates in both states (51 vs. 52, IIRC) and one favors one candidate (by about 12 points) while the other favors the other (by a larger margin). Tell me the coverage is equal. Tell me the pictures coming out of each state are telling the same story. Tell me there is no bias in the people who are deciding which pictures get trotted out as 'objective news'. As for sports photography, I can slap a 300/2.8 on one of the Nikons and create drama too. But one is nothing more than wrasslin, while the other is determining the fate of a nation. Creative editing has no place in the news business.
Excellent discussion. Both of you are right, of course, in your own way - and IMHO both are wrong. RK is wrong in the way that xDGx explains, but xDGx is wrong in that last line. The news business is all about editing. Journalists claim to be objective - which should be your first hint that they are nothing of the sort. Although the newspaper obviously predates the Revolution, it is not true that news - or even printing news - has remained the same business. The transformational technology was the telegraph, exploited by the Associated Press. Before the telegraph, printers lacked a source of news independent of physical transportation - and therefore were not in the business of telling people what was going on. They called them "newspapers" even back then - but only after the advent of the telegraph did they actually have a perishable commodity - news the public hadn't heard yet - to sell before its "sell by" date. The claim of journalistic objectivity traces back to the need of journalists in town A to sell news from town B when the newspaper in town A had no reporters in town B.
Journalists claim to be objective because it helps them sell their product. That is their interest, not "the public interest." Journalists have claimed to be objective ever since the Associated Press began, a century and a half ago; it is unlikely that anyone alive today even heard from her grandparents what it was like when newspapers actually were fractiously independent and didn't allow each other to claim to be objective. The more journalists are able to claim objectivity, the more certain we may be that they are not objective. They are selling something - the idea that whatever they know over the AP newswire is important simply because you haven't heard it yet. The news business is a propaganda business. Nothing more. Creative editing is only to be expected.
That 'creative editing' is to be expected from the current lot of 'journalists' does not validate it as news.
Go back to the NC State Obama Rally images.
The cropped image presented as 'news'
The image that was not circulated showing a decidedly different message.
Now let's look at the The Elements of Journalism
http://www.answers.com/journalism&r=67
According to The Elements of Journalism by Bill Kovach and Tom Rosensteil, there are nine elements of journalism
In order for a journalist to fulfill their duty of providing the people with the information they need to be free and self-governing, they must follow these guidelines:
Journalism's first obligation is to the truth.
Its first loyalty is to the citizens.
Its essence is discipline of verification.
Its practitioners must maintain an independence from those they cover.
It must serve as an independent monitor of power.
It must provide a forum for public criticism and compromise.
It must strive to make the significant interesting, and relevant.
It must keep the news comprehensive and proportional.
Its practitioners must be allowed to exercise their personal conscience.
I submit to you that the 'creative cropping' (and now negative imagery of Hillary) used wholesale by the MSM in their adulative veneration of Obama is anything but journalism.
This of course is not news ;)