Joy Giovanni and Journalism

The Internet allows for journalists to better broadcast information, convey messages through new media, and access sources and data with significantly less effort. Hopefully that ease of access won't foster laziness, though, because the Internet also subjects each and every story to an unheard level of scrutiny and oversight from the public. The broad reach of the Internet enables experts in the most obscure fields to tear into even innocuous mistakes, theoretically making the discourse more accurate and therefore more beneficial to society.

My favorite example of this was uncovered by this blog, the purpose of which I'm totally unclear on. Back in 2005, a commenter there pointed out that the following photo is not of an unidentified kidnap victim being liberated from the trunk of a car, as the caption claimed, but instead shows (now former) professional wrestler Joy Giovanni.



Three years later, the same photo (a direct lift from an actual televised storyline in the WWE. YouTube here.) is still associated with the AP story (as seen here on MSNBC.com). That's comical.

Thankfully, in this case, technology hasn't outrun ethics. Though less-than-ethical photographers may manipulate their images to intensify the drama within, the Internet has more than enough Photoshop experts to identify and vilify those that do so. There are countless other issues with the "democratization" of journalism as it moves online (more on that to come, I'm sure), but here the art benefits from readers keeping practitioners on the straight and narrow. Would such a hardcore WWE fan have come across that image had it only appeared in newsprint? Doubtful.