Witness or Feel? The "Manipulation Problem" in Immersive Journalism

"[...] imagine the following virtual jump: You are standing in your own living room, looking around at everything familiar. Then, you put on a headset packed with the latest VR technology. Suddenly, you are standing on a buzzing street in war-torn Aleppo, Syria. When you turn around, all you can see is this unfamiliar place, people you have never seen before, but you know you are there; you can hear a girl singing. Then, a bomb explodes." (Flatlandsmo and Gynnild, 2021, p.62).

The whole point of immersion is to build empathy, to get swept up in it and feel as if you're really there – but that can create problems, too. One major criticism of immersive journalism has always been that it taps into users' emotions too heavily, bordering on (emotional) manipulation.

Manipulation is generally defined as a cunning way of unfairly influencing others. While in some cases journalism can legitimately aim to influence, emotionally charged material raises questions of undue influence, says philosopher Deborah G. Johnson. Indeed, VR is intense: Interactive experiences can trigger highly emotional responses that become deeply embedded in people, raising concerns about "being too close", (emotional) manipulation, and voyeurism (Johnson, 2021, p.75).

How much image alteration is "manipulation"?

Of course, it makes a difference whether we talk about "manipulation" as in "this constitutes an attempt to manipulate someone's emotions" or the more technical way: "someone selected, framed and presented information in a certain way". We're going to take a look at the latter for a moment.

Immersive journalism pioneer Nonny de la Peña usually works with 3D reconstructions of real places. When they were really novel, VR reports have often been met with a great deal of skepticism. De la Peña, however, defends them against 2D content, claiming that when it comes down to it, 2D can be just as "manipulative" as 3D – referring mainly to image post-processing and similar corrections. De la Peña goes on to explain how the 3D models she works with are growing ever more photorealistic: They are grounded in real-world sources (like 2D footage is) and then refined through technologies like 3D reconstruction (2010, p. 299).

If anything, she argues, it's 2D video that "misleads" – confined as it is to a flat screen with a narrow field of view:

"[...] while observing a human disaster in another part of the world by TV, the viewers may be misled to infer that they understand the human suffering involved. However, the fact is that they are only viewing and hearing a low resolution, sampled, duplicate of reality that does not cater to all senses. In this sense, traditional media can be claimed to depreciate and underrepresent reality." (De la Peña, 2010, p.299).

For De la Peña, 360° and VR journalism is not only ethical; when guided by journalistic best practice, it's an even more faithful reconstruction of reality than 2D video (2010, p.299).

It all ties back to the bigger question of what ethical responsibilities (VR) media professionals have toward their audience. In theory, everyone agrees that such a responsibility exists, but there are different thresholds at which ethics become an "issue". 

This lack of consensus is also evident in the responses of 360° journalists interviewed by communication scientist Tanja Aitamurto, who found that there was no clear-cut point at which certain practices were considered equally unacceptable by everyone. Among other things, her article covers "image manipulation" in 360° videos, i.e., any kind of alteration made during post-production. For example, this could involve removing or masking less important objects, such as tripods or the journalist themselves, from the scene (Aitamurto, 2019, p.15); something I've also written about in this article about my thesis. 

The result of the interviews: Journalists who disapproved of one type of story or "manipulation" would permit another (Aitamurto, 2019, p.10). While there's a general agreement that there should be universal ethical "best practices", no one seems to know what these could look like (Aitamurto, 2019, p.7).

Of course, professional journalists aren't actually trying to manipulate their audience, as in: spreading misinformation. Rather, they believe they're helping to foster a better understanding of the journalistic narrative with the way they tell a story (Aitamurto, 2019, p.14).

How much emotion is too much?

Modern "2D journalists" (i.e., the majority of media workers) are no strangers to accusations of "(emotional) manipulation" either. Critics have often pointed out that reporting formats like Instagram stories or YouTube videos also rely on emotions. Just how emotional a story becomes heavily depends on its subject matter – not necessarily its format or a technical medium like VR glasses (I've addressed points of crictism like the "objectivitiy standard" and misinformation fears in immersive media in a previous article).

Sometimes journalists also have reason to insert emotion into their work. Media scholar Stephen Jukes writes: „Emotion makes stories interesting; it captures the hopes and fears of those caught up in what we call news [...]. No journalist wants to write a dull story, and not even the most [...] well-funded news outlets can afford to bore their audience." (2020, p.159).

Of course, a legitimate question remains: What role does the more intense, immersive experience in VR play here?

360° journalist Zhara Rasool adopts a critical view. She talks about her 360° story on a refugee camp, where she used real video footage:

„[...] we created our story around Jamalida, a mother, widow and refugee who has experienced terrible things, but also has a strong spirit. We created a story around her reality and the things she does every day. [...] Rather than victimizing our subjects, we try to show life through their perspective, while making sure our audience understands the overarching political and cultural context that has created those realities."

For Rasool, the question isn't just why a story is told, but how. One hurdle is ensuring that audiences understand that "feeling as if you were there" is in fact not the same as actually being there. She writes: "The danger is that using empathy as the major avenue for telling VR stories can lead to emphasizing the subject as a conduit for emotion, rather than a real person whose life has been impacted by local and international events."

A journalists's responsibility

Rasool is right: Experiencing VR or 360° video with a headset is not the same as being somewhere in person – but it can certainly feel like it. Remember the quote from the beginning: "Suddenly, you are standing on a buzzing street in war-torn Aleppo". Stories about war in VR are especially controversial. They usually involve 3D reconstructions of locations, but use authentic audio recordings, not real video.

I've heard different takes here. Some media creators find those kinds of stories informative. Others quickly feel trapped in them; VR can easily overwhelm people or even cause them to (re-)experience trauma. 360° videos or 3D reconstructions affect the emotional impact – and the user's ability to distance themselves. Here's an example by tech-writer Scott Eggimann for how intense VR can feel (granted, it's about sim racing, but it gets the point across):

"[...] it doesn't feel like a game. Your hands sweat, your breathing quickens, and your heart rate spikes [...]. That's not imagination. It's biology. [...] The truth is, your adrenal glands don't know you're sitting in the safety of your home [...]. They only know what your brain tells them."

It might all come down to which story you're telling. Travel journalism? Most would do it. War stories? Make sure to take precautions. XR experts Manuela Feyder and Linda Rath-Wiggins affirm: Media professionals have a responsibility to produce immersive content that considers the potential impact on users (2018, p.91).

However, users aren't a monolith. Everyone reacts differently to physical or mental immersion in VR, and these reactions can't always be predicted in advance. Additionally, VR stories are designed for "the masses", so it's not always possible to cater to specific individual needs.

The ethical rulebook that hasn't been written

So, is it the individual journalist who must decide what to show and what to omit in VR, where to direct the viewer's gaze, and whether or not to include a trigger warning? Or do we need some kind of universal ethical rulebook?

An article by Ana Luisa Sánchez Laws and Tormod Utne titled "Ethics Guidelines for Immersive Journalism" proposes to reshape said guidelines around the audience's experience, treating psychological harm seriously and involving audiences directly in shaping the rules that govern how immersive stories are told. The authors argue that VR journalism creates mutual responsibilities: Journalists must account for the intensified experience they're offering, and audiences need to understand what they're consenting to when they "step into" a story.

Social researchers Uskali et al. make a proposal for how to tackle VR stories with hard-to-gauge emotional impact: set a minimum age for experiencing the content. However, it remains unclear how to enforce this. (2021, p.56). 

Many media companies already have ethical guidelines for 2D reporting in place. Those could be extended and applied to immersive pieces too.

Immersive journalism researcher Gary M. Hardee puts it this way: "[...] standards and codes of ethics stand at the gate as the guardian of professionalism and credibility" (2016, p.681). Journalists and media law must find ways to regulate immersive journalism (Von Lewinski, 2018, p.8) and balance „accuracy of the facts, the fairness of multiple perspectives and the thoroughness of reporting" (Hardee, 2016, pp.687–688) against the pull of immersion. Ethical guidelines and accountability are what protects users and earns the genre serious standing as fact-based storytelling.

Sources

Key Visual

Barbara Zandoval on Unsplash.

Literature

Some quotes have been translated from German into English by the author of this blogpost.

Aitamurto, Tanja: Normative paradoxes in 360° journalism: Contested accuracy and objectivity. In: Jones, Steve et al. (Eds.): New Media & Society. Volume 21, Issue 1. A.o. Los Angeles 2019, pp. 3–19.

De la Peña, Nonny et al.: Immersive Journalism: Immersive Virtual Reality for the First-Person Experience of News. In: Slater, Mel (Ed.): Presence: Teleoperators and Virtual Environments. Volume 19, Issue 4. Cambridge (MA) 2010, pp.291–301.

Feyder, Manuela and Rath-Wiggins, Linda: VR-Journalismus. Ein Handbuch für die journalistische Ausbildung und Praxis. Wiesbaden 2018.

Flatlandsmo, Siri and Gynnild, Astrid: Project Syria. Accuracy in immersive journalism. In: Uskali, Turo et al. (Eds.): Immersive Journalism as Storytelling. Ethics, Production, and Design. Oxon/ New York 2021, pp.60–69.

Hardee, Gary M.: Immersive Journalism in VR: Four Theoretical Domains for Researching a Narrative Design Framework. In: Lackey, Stephanie and Shumaker, Randall (Eds.): Virtual, Augmented and Mixed Reality. 8th International Conference. Cham (Schweiz) 2016, pp. 679–690.

Johnson, Deborah, G.: Promises and Perils in Immersive Journalism. In: Uskali, Turo et al. (Eds.): Immersive Journalism as Storytelling. Ethics, Production, and Design. Oxon/ New York 2021, pp.71–81.

Jukes, Stephen: Journalism and Emotion. A.o. London 2020.

Uskali, Turo et al.: Introduction. What is immersive Journalism? In: Uskali, Turo et al. (Eds.): Immersive Journalism as Storytelling. Ethics, Production, and Design. Oxon/ New York 2021, pp.1–9.

Von Lewinski, Kai: Vorwort. In: Von Lewinski, Kai (Ed.): Immersiver Journalismus. Technik – Wirkung– Regulierung. Bielefeld 2018, pp.7–12.