The earliest mass-produced graphics were woodcuts; later, pen-and-ink drawings were used.

These graphic styles required hours of preparation and an artist’s perspective.

They commanded a great deal of attention because they stood out; few graphics were available to the viewer.

Graphics were attractive and sold newspapers and magazines, so the technology to reproduce them was driven forward by demand.

The Maine incident illustrates how drawings can include bias and reflect the artist’s purpose or perspective.

Useful to “Yellow Journalism”--to inflame or astonish readers and sell papers.

These drawings are pure speculation. To modern readers used to photographs, such blatant invention seems bizarre and shocking.

A New York shantytown.

Earliest photo published in an American paper (the Daily Graphic, New York, 1880).

Relative to drawings and woodcuts, photos made a substantial change in the rhetoric of the publication.

The capacity of photographs to present reality conferred great power on newspapers.

The decision to publish photos of corpses after the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire set a new ethical standard.

As in all rhetoric, ethos matters. Newspapers drew authority from the photo: at first the ethos drew from the idea that a photo is ‘captured truth’ and is not biased, shaped, composed, or altered.

This altered the rhetorical nature of stories that included photographs and publications that ran them—or refused to run them.

That idea prevailed until the web. Now, that rhetorical perspective seems quaint and primitive.

Of course, we know now that there are many ways to influence what a reader takes from a photo.

Crop out the smiling spectators and you have one kind of picture; leave them in and you have another.

Now that photographs can be shot and published instantly, ethical dilemmas over publication have shifted radically.

Malcolm Browne and his editors at Time hesitated before publishing these photos (which won Browne a Pulitzer.) Should Browne have attempted to prevent this suicide rather than photographing it? Does photographing it further the monk’s purposes, or simply encourage similar behavior? Would Thich Quang Duc have done it if no photographer had been present?

Technology and the marketplace have shifted the rhetoric of the photograph.

For most of the 20th century, the rhetoric of photographs was a one-way process. Now, most people are capable of shooting video or photographs in a few moments’ notice.

That rhetoric is now a two-way process—if not a multi-way process.

Citizen-shot video runs on mainstream-media platforms. This is only partly a function of the improvement inquality of cell-phone cameras.

Obviously, mainstream media outlets have long provided video or photography suitable for viewing on handheld devices, so the one-way process has given way to a two-way process.

This techno-rhetoric has also become more effective because of its ability to compel a story into the public eye.

A general capability to shoot video has forced media outlets to change their ethical and visual standards, but more importantly to yield some editorial control over what is covered.

If the media don’t publish a story, it will be published on social media. Increasingly, both things occur. So photo technology is driving a convergence of the traditionally separate forms of distribution.

Two-way rhetoric arguments are not new. Powerless constituencies or unsatisfied parties to a political dispute have long argued (often as a last resort) that themedia are responsible for unfavorable news.

But the internet and the ubiquity of cell-phone cameras create a way to measure such arguments.

In the long run, it is apparent that the capacity to shoot and publish video will produce a serious challenge to the viability of main stream media organizations.