Instagram as a Source on Web Portals

News Values and Ethical Controversies

Abstract

The importance of visual communication in the modern media is an indisputable fact. However, the development of technology (especially digital photography) and the social media (especially those based on visual communication, such as Instagram) and their being used as sources in the media have called into question the credibility and ethics of visual media content. Internet media often report about posts from the social media with no critical distancing: rather, they are guided by sensationalism as a criterion of success with the audience. This brings to the foreground ethical controversies such as manipulation and processing of photos, violating the right to privacy, portraying victims, crossing the boundaries of good taste, etc. Also questionable is the extent to which media contributions meet the criteria of news values, i.e. whether or not they are relevant for the public. The aim of this paper is to analyze the content of Croatian web portals, focusing on articles based on Instagram as their source. The authors analyze the content of the following web portals: 24 sata, IndexHR, Jutarnji list and Večernji list on a sample of 480 articles in order to discover how media–relevant they are in relation to news values; also, the authors examine the ethicality of the visual communication evident in these posts.