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Surveillance Videos and Visual Transparency in Journalism

Despite an increasing flow of images and video clips in digital news media, empirical studies of journalistic transparency have, so far, mostly investigated verbal messaging. This study examines to what extent expressed principles of accountability, interactivity, and background openness might also apply to the digital dissemination of visual storytelling. An inductive examination of global surveillance videos forwarded mainly by online news sites in Scandinavia indicates that independent of their factual accountability, surveillance videos serve a role as visual “proof” in the news. This study suggests that visual transparency in journalism, defined as visual disclosure of events, issues, and situations that have earlier been inaccessible to the public, is often accompanied by factual opaqueness. Thus, the reliance on surveillance videos as “objective” information allows media to reinforce existing power structures within society while appearing to be transparent. It emerges from the data that the growth of visual transparency in the news calls for closer examinations of the interrelationship between transparency and objectivity in journalism.