Ethics & Practice of Photojournalism in Pakistani Print Newspapers: A Phenomenological Inquiry

Abstract

The ethical dilemma is one of the biggest challenge faced by the Photojournalism because there is no “Photojournalist’s Hippocratic Oath,” no common list of Commandments of ethics to follow during the practice of photojournalism. Every news organization and publication set its own ethical standards according to their interests, in terms of pushing the ethics. The violation of the ethics leads to manipulating the visual images into the minds of the public, also put impact on the policymaking. The difference between ethics and practice could be explained by using social responsibility as a theoretical framework. For this purpose, the study utilizes a phenomenological approach to document the real-life experiences of the nine photojournalists who are practicing photojournalism in Pakistan. Their experiences are analyzed in the context of Social Responsibility theory. The analysis demonstrates that the majority of photojournalist process of practicing photojournalism is the same. The analysis also indicates that the photojournalism faced multiple types of ethical violation in which some of them are vastly available among the photojournalists. We also identified, that these ethical violations occur due to the various factors, which we identified during the investigation. This finding indicates, that the ethics do not directly link with social responsibility, but also to the professional implications, therefore social responsibility theories impact on the ethical concern is not generalizable in this case. Furthermore, the analysis also indicates that there is no straightforward relationship between social responsibility and violation of the ethics as it may vary situation to situation.