CBS Tries to Laugh It Off Using Photoshop Software to Change A Katie Couric Picture, But For A TV Network That Has Worked So Hard to Regain Its Credibility This Is No Laughing Matter

Philip M. Stone - August 31, 2006

When news organizations shoot themselves in the foot they do it with great style. Someone at the CBS photo department thought new anchor Katie Couric looked too fat in the picture chosen to illustrate her for a magazine article CBS prepared so editors decided to slim her down electronically by some 20 pounds (9kg).

Spot the Difference?

For a news organization whose last anchor fell because of journalistic errors, one would think that CBS would do everything in its power to keep things honest and upright to keep a hold on  its regained credibility as it prepares to launch new anchor Katie Couric on September 5. They paid her $15 million annually to leave NBC’s Today Show and the up-front sales for her CBS news program are said to be so strong that the $15 million is already back in the CBS bank.

CBS had spent additional millions since June in marketing Couric. It has sent her around the country talking to folks and the media and practically everything done so far to promote her new role has met with a positive press. And then they go and do something stupid and electronically alter a photo.

No big deal you say, all they did was take a little fat off the waist from a picture taken in July. Well, when a Reuters photojournalist stringer just made the smoke overhanging Beirut look darker than it really was during the recent conflict then  all hell broke out in the journalistic world. Senior editors the world over said they would never permit such electronic editing. Reuters fired the photographer and purged all of his output from over the years in its photo archives.

But CBS doesn’t see this as that serious. Its line seems to be that some promotional magazine called Watch Magazine went further than it should in editing a picture. No big deal. Just somebody in the photo department going too far. “I talked to my photo department, we had a discussion about it. I think photo understands this is not something we’d do in the future,” said Gil Schwartz, executive vice president of communications for CBS Corp.” No one was going to get fired.

That same Gil Schwartz is listed on the masthead of the magazine as the editor in chief which means he really has the final editorial authority for what appeared in print, just as Dan Rather and Andrew Hayward, then CBS News President, had the ultimate editorial authority for the President Bush National Guard expose that turned out to be unsupported, and we know what finally happened to Rather and Hayward.

Broadcasting and Cable Magazine points out that when the launch of Watch was announced last year, CBS Director of Communications Jerry Murphy  stated, “It really is a journalistic enterprise.” Murphy is listed on the magazine’s  masthead as editor. CBS provides the entire editorial content for Watch,  a quarterly that is distributed by CBS stations and also on American Airlines flights. It has a circulation around 400,000. 

So did the photo editor do all of this on his/her own or were there instructions from up high? Enquiring minds want to know.

CBS seems to fail to recognize that most people are not going to understand the difference between CBS News the CBS Photo Department or the CBS Communications Department. To most people it’s all CBS. Additionally, for those who do see the difference one obvious question comes to mind: If one part of CBS plays hanky-panky with visuals then who is to say that other parts of the company don’t?

And that’s why CBS needs to treat this far more seriously than just trying to laugh it off. Like issuing a strong statement decrying such image altering and, yes, maybe bouncing the guy who did it.

Whether Katie Couric looks lighter than she really is is a very small drop in the large ocean of global news that daily affects our lives – but it is a big deal when a news organization like CBS that has worked so hard to clean up its image just doesn’t seem to recognize the journalistic damage that altering still pictures can do to its journalistic reputation, and just tries to laugh it off. It’s no joke.

CBS News said it had no idea that a photo had been retouched in such a way, but its President Sean McManus also tried to make believe this was no big deal. “I’ve asked that three inches in height be added to my official CBS photo,” he quipped to the New York Daily News.

It does seem that after the media fallout, CBS News has taken the issue a bit more seriously, and has started to make some distance between itself and the communications department. McManus said Wednesday the picture editing was . "done unilaterally in the photo department". He said he did not know about the picture until he got an email Tuesday while on the road telling him what was going on. “ It shouldn't have been done,"  he said.

As with many such journalistic excess exposes it was the bloggers who first brought this one to light. The web site, TV Newser, printed the before and after pictures that were later picked up, mostly without credit, by the New York media.