ABSTRACT
This project is basically an unrelated attempt to unravel what pictures entails and its role to news credibility using Enugu metropolis as a case study. The main aim is to unveil the impact it creates in ensuring news credibility. This will in turn clear the doubt people maintain. On its significance towards news credibility. The method adopted for collecting data for this research was the survey method and also the method of analysis was percentages form. Based on the analysis, the result shared that picture guarantees better understanding of news. This entails that picture is inevitable in making news attractive and interesting. From the above findings, the recommendation made sticks to creating awareness of what picture and its role to news presentation.
CHAPTER ONE
1.0 INTRODUCTION
A picture is worth a thousand words, but sometimes a thousand words is still woe-fully inadequate for capturing the visual and emotional effect an image has on its viewer. Photo-graphs can instantly transport the viewer to a new location or moment in time from the joy of World War II’s end captured in Alfred Eisenstaedt’s “Time Square Kiss,” (see Appendix A, Fig-ure 1) to the strife of famine in Sudan captured by Kevin Carter (see Appendix A, Figure 2). These iconic photos are permanently etched into the memories of billions of people around the world, far more than the written accounts that accompanied them. The picture brings with it a wide range of human emotion and is conveyed more directly and authentically through a pho-tograph than through text (Brantner, Lobinger, & Wetzstein, 2011).
Pictures provide a strong medium that has empowered civil rights movements, raised awareness of human injustice, and shined light into the darkness of the human condition. With the constant growth of the internet and the explosion of hand-held devices that feed constant in-teraction, the news industry is still evolving to the new demands of its audience (Meikle, 2016). Although citizens desire news feeds of what is happening now, there is also a fundamental need for content that is accurate, unbiased, and in the public’s best interest:
News is where decisions about how we organize ourselves and each other are proposed, discussed and held up for endorsement or rejection. News is where we hear stories about ourselves and each other, and where we work out how we feel about the decisions and
controversies and events of the day. News also confers a particular status on those media organizations that produce it. (Meikle, 2016, p. 69)
The time has long past when newspapers were the sole distributor of news. The once-massive newsprint industry has steadily trimmed away at its newsrooms and shifted personnel to meet the surge in online content. Photojournalists and visual journalists have been greatly af-fected by the downturn of the news industry (García, 2015). In 2007, there were 68,160 jobs in newspaper newsrooms. However, as seen in data compiled by Barthel in 2016, the number of jobs had decreased nearly 61% to only 41,400 newspaper jobs nationwide by the year 2015 (journalism.org). The growth of social media, combined with the innovations of mobile technol-ogy, have paved the way for citizen photojournalism, in this case amateur pictures, to doc-ument news. As pictures fill our news feeds and capture our attention, a question arises: Does a professional need to be taking the picture? As the news industry changes by placing a greater demand for immediate news, this now raises the question: How credible is the information, and who is reporting it, and is there a rela-tionship between credibility of information and the reporter? Credibility has been one of the cor-nerstones of the news industry, and this area of interest is known as messenger credibility (Rob-erts, 2010). “For messenger credibility, the research suggests that messengers that are more likely to be believed are more likely to be perceived as experts (Hallahan, 1999), trustworthy (In-fante, 1980), and dynamic (Johnson, B. T. & Eagly, 1989; Roberts, 2010, p.45).
