Reporters and photojournalists at the Western Producer are required to provide reportage of what they see and experience, accurately and within context.
This statement may sound very bureaucratic, but journalism professionals take such words seriously.
The photograph appearing on the Feb. 15 Producer front page has drawn several reader comments, condemning our publishing the image of an unshielded upper end of a grain auger loading a truck. Some readers have also pointed out that from their perspective the truck seemed overloaded and also posed a danger.
Read Also
Topsy-turvy precipitation this year challenges crop predictions
Rainfall can vary dramatically over a short distance. Precipitation maps can’t catch all the deviations, but they do provide a broad perspective.
The role of the journalist, as we at the Western Producer define it, is to publish reality, distilling information and making selections for readers that we hope they themselves might make if they had the opportunity. If we were to publish only stories that recounted the wonderful nature of prairie agriculture and the positive aspects of the market and its players, we would be of little use to the reader.
The same criteria applies to photographs as stories. As journalists we are the story-tellers of our culture and any lessons to be learned by the reader must come from the information itself and not from its editing or presentation.
The dangers of unguarded equipment should be well known to all farmers but as I travel extensively throughout the agricultural world I see as many guards on the ground as on the implements.
Should I photograph only the ones on the equipment? Should I report only the positive side of stories and ignore negative information altogether? If so, then the reader need never know of the demise of the Crow, of rail-line abandonment, of floods or drought, or environmentalist attacks on livestock producers.
Our credibility lies in our ability to print the truth. If that means unshielded equipment, cattle branding and protest images among the grand prairie sunsets, smiles of farm children and newborn livestock, then we are portraying today’s prairie agriculture exactly as it is.
