Presidential Hopeful or Used Car Salesman?

Staffers for Virginia Gov. Mark Warner were not amused by this picture of their boss on the cover of the New York Times Magazine.

Today's medianote rolled newspapers and magazines, photography, politics and journalistic ethics into one compact little package. Virginia Gov. Mark Warner was the subject of a recent cover story in the New York Times Magazine. The cover photo was somewhat nontraditional, creating colors and other features that weren't quite real. After listening to a National Public Radio story about the incident, we discussed how real (or not real) photojournalism is and what ethical responsibilities news organizations should live up to in an age where photos can be altered in a variety of ways. Some students also commented that an unfortunate byproduct of our image-saturated mass media is that politicians are sometimes judged by things as irrelevent as unflattering photos.

***ABOUT TONIGHT'S FIELD TRIP: I got a call from On-Camera Audiences, the company that has arranged for us to attend "The ShowBiz Show" this evening (Wednesday, March 22). The taping will start a little later than expected, so come at 6:30 instead of 6. Out time will be around 9:30 instead of 9.

***POSTSCRIPT THURSDAY, 3/23, 9:20 A.M.: Many apologies for last night's field trip that wasn't. Apparently The Showbiz Show is a bigger draw than anyone realized. We booked a group of 60. A total of 78 MC101s and guests showed up. We all stood on the sidewalk on Bronson Avenue for a while. Then the folks whose job it is to make sure the audience is full for every taping (audience recruiters, they are called) told me that they were already full and were turning us away despite our group reservation. We will, however, receive our full attendance payment, which will be turned over to Food For Thought. Everyone who signed the sign-in sheet will receive full field trip credit.

To those of you who were there, thanks for not beating me senseless when I got the bad news and had to break it to you.