Abstract:
This research was an experimental research. It aimed at finding out the level of appropriateness in blurring crime images in 3 types of news reports: 1) accident news reports, 2) murder news reports, and 3) suicide news reports.
The sample of the study consisted of 100 people living in Pathum Thani province. A simple random sampling method was employed to identify the sample subjects. Two types of instruments were used in the experiment. Firstly, crime images from the Dailynews newspaper were collected and classified into 3 types: accidents news reports, murder news reports, and suicide news reports. Three images, including one image from each type of news report, were taken from the front pages of the Dailynews newspaper published between January and April 2015. Sharpness of the images was reduced in areas that were terrifying. Blurring methods to decrease terror used were Gaussian blur filters and Tiles filters from the Photoshop program, which were the same methods used by the Dailynews publisher. Next, the images were blurred into eleven levels of sharpness and then were shown to the sample. After that, questionnaires were distributed to the sample to find out the levels of appropriateness of the images that were suitable for publishing. The other instrument was a questionnaire. It was employed to survey the opinions towards viewers understanding of the news content and the degree of the violence of the news images. Statistics used in the experiment included average, percentage, standard deviation, and the test of the sample group after viewing news images.
The results indicated that after viewing accident news images, suicide news images, and murder news images of all eleven levels of blurring, the sample understood the content of the news images at the same level; therefore, there was not much difference when compared to their viewings of the original images. Also, their views on violence of the blurred news images showed no difference from the original ones. This indicated that Gaussian blur filters and Tiles filters from the Photoshop program had no impact on the understanding of the images content or a decrease in the terror of the images.