By Jonás Tijerino
Increased ICE activity over the last few months has resulted in several highly documented civilian deaths, including Renée Good and Alex Pretti in Minnesota. Civilians and journalists alike have responded by filming and photographing ICE agents and their activities. As agents interact with onlookers, the traditional separation between subject and documentarian is blurred, with visual journalists now finding themselves becoming a part of the story.
In just the first year of the second Trump administration, journalists have been banned from historically accessible reporting spaces. The president has scaled up his verbal attacks against the news media, creating an unsafe environment for reporters trying to do their jobs. (When reporters hold an identity that the administration has attacked – immigrant, Latine, trans – there’s yet another layer of risk to manage). Meanwhile, social media continues to flood the information ecosystem, raising questions about what separates a trained photojournalist from a person with a phone camera.
Across two conversations with working journalists – Ruthie Hauge, photo director of The Cap Times in Madison, Wisconsin and Tanya Habjouqa, a documentary photographer who has worked predominantly in the Middle East – a single through-line emerged: the profession is being pushed into a new ethical gray zone where truth, safety, access and public trust collide. In this new era, ethical standards for photojournalists will need to evolve.
The problem of disappearing access
Under the current administration, journalists are losing access to traditional reporting spaces. In March 2025, Associated Press reporters were banned from the Oval Office after refusing to refer to the Gulf of Mexico as the Gulf of America per the president’s demand. In October of the same year, the U.S. Department of Defense revealed restrictions for reporters working in the Pentagon, including that they may not report any news without official approval. Around 50 reporters from major news outlets turned in their badges, refusing to agree to the new restrictions.
When journalists cannot reach the spaces where important events are unfolding, the work necessarily shifts. Habjouqa describes how restricted access has already changed the meaning of documentary photography, pointing to the work of photographer Debi Cornwall, who turned to conceptual imagery for her 2017 photobook “Welcome to Camp America: Inside Guantanamo Bay”, to convey the truth of a place she could not see firsthand.
“As access is limited, photojournalists have to look at alternative ways of telling their stories, and a lot of the time, it becomes a more creative documentary approach,” Habjouqa said.
Local journalists face a similar challenge, especially in political and law-enforcement contexts where access is uneven or withheld. The question becomes: how creative can a photojournalist get without crossing an ethical line?
“There is no line,” Hauge said. “As long as you followed ethics and didn’t manipulate the image or the situation that you’re photographing in.”
For Hauge, creativity in constrained conditions is part of the work.
“It feels like a challenge…shaking up the dice and rolling them, and whatever lands there is what you have to work with,” she said.
Yet both photographers agree that as access continues to shrink, the ethical pressure on journalists forced to find another way will only increase.
Identity-based risks
Traditional ethical codes assume a “neutral” and safe, or protected, reporter. Neither Hauge nor Habjouqa finds that assumption realistic anymore. Both the Society of Professional Journalists and the National Press Photographers Association codes of ethics mention seeking diverse voices and minimizing harm. But neither mention how a journalist’s identity factors into practicing journalism. Hauge describes the emotional and ethical tension of photographing issues that intersect directly with allied communities and social issues she cares about personally, such as LGBTQ+ rights.
“Sometimes that can be really hard to disconnect your own emotions,” she said. “It’s nearly impossible to not let that shape what you do.”
The problem deepens in hostile environments. As ICE activity intensified nationwide, Hauge began wondering how journalists whose identities place them at direct risk can safely cover events that target people like them.
“How does a Latino photographer protect themself while photographing an ICE raid that’s targeting Latinos? That’s sickening and terrifying to me,” she said. “There’s no guide on how to do this.”
Citizen media, AI and the collapse of ethical guardrails
Social media and citizen journalism have fundamentally unsettled the profession of photojournalism. Habjouqa connects this shift to years of smartphones documenting police violence.
“With Black Lives Matter, it’s not like there ever stopped being police violence against people of color,” Habjouqa said. “But it was never covered to the degree it needed to be. I remember watching the Trayvon Martin case on social media from [Palestine] and seeing how it was being told on social media and having a sensation like ‘holy shit, this hits different.’”
Habjouqa describes an increase in quality reportage from everyday people, denoting a shift in sentiment about citizen journalism from when she was first getting started in her career in the mid 2000s.
“There’s Trayvon Martin, there’s Eric Garner, ‘I can’t breathe, I can’t breathe.’ The immediacy of that video and the words and the way it was framed, I remember sobbing,” she said. “I don’t know if a news story as they would have reported it in the mainstream media would have rendered that emotion. It was at that point that I understood that, yes, I’ll read the mainstream journalism, but I’m going to have to start developing trusted news sources on social media.”
Hauge sees another dimension: the erosion of ethical literacy.
“The amount of times I have to explain news ethics…is absurd,” Hauge said. “People just don’t know that it exists.”
The problem is not just the flood of untrained visual storytellers, it’s also that AI now produces images that audiences cannot always distinguish from real photographs.
When asked whether an AI image could ever accompany a news story, Hauge is unequivocal:
“I don’t see any place for it in photojournalism at all.”
For journalists, citizen media and AI are not threats because they exist, but because they operate with no ethical framework, no accountability and no expectation of verification.
The public’s role in the ethical breakdown
Habjouqa goes a step further, arguing that the crisis is not only technological, it is civic.
She describes a “social contract” between journalists and their communities that has unraveled as audiences retreat into their echo chambers.
“You have to be invested in your community,” she said. “I think that if everyone is going inwards into their little silos of news or information online, it’s dangerous. There is a responsibility – we have to read news and know what’s going on. I think we’ve lost where that contract is completely.”
As local newspapers disappear, she says, the public loses both the habit and the means of consuming verified information. Journalists lose the audience that once understood the rigor behind their work.
For Habjouqa, the ethical burden is not only on journalists, but on audiences that no longer trust, read or contextualize the work of trained professionals.
An ethical crisis in search of new rules
A picture emerges of a profession guided by an ethical code built for another era:
- An era without AI
- Without widespread restricted access
- Without identity-linked threats
- Without citizen media augmenting newsroom coverage
- Without algorithms shaping public understanding
Neither photographer believes photojournalism is dying. But both are clear: its ethical terrain has shifted faster than its standards.
The NPPA code’s long-standing ban on manipulation remains crucial, but it does not address the dilemmas they face today.
What do photographers do when:
- They cannot enter the places where events happen?
- Their identities place them at risk in their field?
- Audiences misinterpret their work through political filters?
- AI begins producing images indistinguishable from theirs?
- Citizen media dominates public attention with no oversight?
These are not theoretical questions but daily realities that neither newsroom policies nor professional codes yet answer.
If the field wants to navigate this moment without losing its ethical center, it must build new guidance for a world where the tools, risks and audiences have all radically changed, but the stakes for the truth have not.
As Habjouqa put it in one of her most direct reflections on the profession’s future:
“I don’t know if our time is done, but it will be if they don’t start investing again.”
Jonás Tijerino is a 2025-26 fellow at the Center for Journalism Ethics and a graduate student in the School of Journalism and Mass Communication at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
The Center for Journalism Ethics encourages the highest standards in journalism ethics worldwide. We foster vigorous debate about ethical practices in journalism and provide a resource for producers, consumers and students of journalism.