philip lelyveld The world of entertainment technology

Virtual Reality and Journalistic Ethics: Where Are the Lines?

But how do the principles of fair and accurate reporting apply when the camera setup doesn’t simply depict an event, but exploits human perception to place audiences directly in the scene? How are editing choices amplified in such contexts? How to shoot 360-degrees without capturing the journalist and his or her equipment in the middle of it — and are efforts to remove them fair? And how does experiencing a story in virtual reality affect how viewers remember and respond to the story at hand?

To Robert Hernandez, an associate professor at the University of Southern California’s School for Communication and Journalism and a pioneer in the realm of virtual and immersive media and a self-proclaimed “mad scientist” of journalism, that’s the power and allure of virtual reality. “I can put you in a situation where your brain knows it’s not real, but it still feels like it’s real,” he says. “That can invoke trauma, that can invoke bad memories. And as a journalist I have to ask what’s my job? Is my job to hurt you? It’s to inform you, and sometimes it’s a little in the middle. I need you to understand what that little refugee kid is going through.”

It gets much more ethically complicated than editing out the tripod. The Times’ 2015 refugee film, called “The Displaced,” received some criticism when viewers realized that certain scenes, including one in which a young boy pedals his bicycle down a sunlit street — a moment of joy in an otherwise stark exploration of refugee life — was at least partly an artificial construction. “Obviously, he doesn’t spontaneously ride down the street with a VR rig on his bicycle every afternoon,” Jake Silverstein, the editor of The New York Times Magazine, told The Poynter Institute, the journalism ethics nonprofit, last year. “He had to wait to let us mount the VR rig on his bicycle, which was complicated and difficult and required a little trial and error. But once he did, he was riding his own bike down the street that he typically rides his bike down.”

See the full story here: https://undark.org/article/virtual-reality-and-journalistic-ethics-where-are-the-lines/