PressEthic

It's hard to have a nice backdrop for a photo in New Orleans these days, unless one has a nice (and durable) underwater camera. That is unless, of course, one happens to need a pretty white church for a live speech on national television. As Frank Rich and Maureen Dowd wrote in the Times this past week, the staging of President Bush's recent speech in New Orleans smelled fishier than the old Fulton Market.

While the Times addressed the staging of the speech through its columnists, few details of the backdrop, and how it happened to look so gleaming, were addressed in subsequent news coverage. For reporters, then, the question remains: should the staging, and not the substance, of a press event be the story?

Hunter S. Thompson, God rest his crazy bones, obviously thought so. He will be remembered as a journalist who not only knew how to make himself the story, but for realizing that the only way to deal with the warped sense of reality of press events is, as he put it, "When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro."

The reason that readers went along with Hunter's strange trips is because he was a mirror of the world he was covering. If he went off on a fantastical tangent, well, politics in the 70s was pretty fantastical, too. If he went a little paranoid, well, the man was covering Nixon.

Newspapers aren't going to suddenly switch to gonzo journalism, but there are some diamonds in Thompson's rough. Readers deserve to know when someone is trying to create a sense of reality that just isn't there. Editors wouldn't stand for a photo that was doctored, so why accept it when a politician doctors the scene?

If politics is a stage, and we merely players, then it's the duty of journalism to let readers know where the stagelights begin.