As Demonstrated During The Lebanon War, Photo Software Can Be A Very Dangerous Journalistic Weapon In The Wrong Hands, And News Agencies Need To Re-Think Their Procedures

Philip Stone August 17, 2006

Does it really matter if the photographer edits his picture to make the smoke look darker than it really was? Does it matter if the same woman shows up five days apart in what looks like the same pose to wail at the death and destruction before her? Yes, it does.

News photography received wounds in the recent Middle East fighting. Bloggers – those same bloggers who ended Dan Rather’s career – came up with numerous examples during the 30 days of fighting of how photographers doctored pictures to make things look worse than they were, or to manipulate pictures to tell the story better.

Adnan Hajj/Reuters

Reuters fired a stringer (freelancer photographer) for making smoke look darker; newspapers like the New York Times had to issue apologies for “mistakes” (in the Times’ case they showed a picture with a man they said was dead only to run another picture later with him walking around) and then there is that July 22 Reuters frontal picture showing a woman wailing at the destruction she sees before her and that same woman shows up Aug.5 in a similar picture from the Associated Press but with a different background. Because of the way those two  pictures are cropped its difficult to tell if it is the same pose used twice, or the same woman just appeared twice, but she is wearing the same clothing.

Reuters, July 22	AP, August 5
same woman? transposed?

Picture executives at Reuters and the Associated Press have beaten their chests in public decrying such events and promising to take steps to ensure such manipulations don’t continue to creep into their coverage – and at the executive level there is no doubt that this manipulation is against all the rules. But the truth is the agencies make it very simple for photographers to get away with such nonsense because the agencies are handling such a volume of pictures daily for which they don’t have  the necessary human resources, and no one had the time to look at that smoke and ask “Don’t you think that’s a bit dark?”

In effect they have allowed technological advancements to run their picture services. Since technology now allows them to move all the pictures they receive every day from around the world – during the war they were probably transmitting more than 2,000 pictures daily  – then, by golly, that’s what they do. Their so-called “picture editors” sitting in picture centers are little more than button pushers – check the caption doesn’t have misspellings and send it on its way. Is it editorially a good picture? Well, we’ve got the satellite space, let’s move it anyway.

No doubt senior picture editors will take this writer to task for that last paragraph but by and large it’s the way it happens. One explanation for a manipulated picture  slipping through was that a low-level staffer was on duty and it got through. Well, yes, that’s the way the system works. You take the young kids and put them on the desk as picture editors. Because of the manipulations the agencies said they would only transmit Middle East pictures that had been approved by a senior picture editor. Well, how long will that continue assuming the ceasefire holds?

The real question news agencies should be asking themselves is why are they moving so many pictures every day? Because the technology allows them to do so.  Whatever happened to a real editing operation to select just the very best of all those pictures that come in every day?

It’s a debate that has been going on for as long as the business – whether a picture service should be judged by the number of pictures it moves every day, or by the quality of an edited service that it moves. Obviously, quantity has won over quality. It should not have.

When this writer was the managing director of Reuters Media for Europe, Middle East and Africa, the question asked at almost every client meeting with a photo client was whether they wanted as many pictures as we could provide or just the best pictures we could provide. And the answers were pretty much divided by newspaper size – the bigger newspapers with large editing systems and plenty of staff said “Give us what you have” and the smaller newspaper, with less sophisticated editing desks and less staff, begged the number of transmissions be reduced.

Today, of course, the agencies feed not only that traditional media but also the photo galleries of the new media, but no matter whom the recipient -- when was the last time any media needed 2,000 pictures a day?

In a newspaper a picture agency is lucky if more than five pictures get used. A great day would be 10. Even on the Internet photo galleries do they really need that entire load?

And with newspapers today cutting back on staff, do they have the necessary photo editors to really handle the loads they might once have done? If you take a newspaper like the New York Times that subscribes to all of the major agencies, they must have been taking in close to 10,000 pictures a day during the Lebanon war. Did they really need and use 10,000 pictures? Could they actually handle that load?

As one very smart photo manager once said to me, “Just because you have the technology to move a lot of photos doesn’t mean you have to use it.” When you have such volume then you need to vastly increase the manpower on the editing desks to handle that volume, and even the news agencies have been cutting back staff, let alone similar cuts by their clients. Thus more pictures, same or less photo editing staff at the agency, and that’s why they are button pushers and not real photo editors.

And then there is what to do about photo manipulation software such as  Photoshop? In the wrong hands it is a very dangerous journalistic tool.

Such software certainly has its uses when it comes to “cleaning up” a picture. Getting rid of dust marks, black lines from loss of transmission and the like. When it first came on the scene in the 1990s the news agencies were, for instance, still using wireless transmissions from Lebanon. Each black and white transmission would take 15 minutes (color would take an hour with four separations). More often than not during a wireless transmission the signal would be lost for a few seconds and then come back, and the result on the finished picture was a long vertical black line, usually through someone’s face, where the transmission was lost. The picture was useless and before photo software it had to be discarded and a new transmission ordered.

And then came Photoshop. Scan that bad transmission into the system and the software could make that black line disappear. The face was intact. No need for another transmission. It was a Godsend.

I had my technical adviser give a demonstration to several media executives of how Photoshop helped clean up pictures and save retransmissions. To end the presentation he thought he would give us a laugh and he put up on screen a picture on which the heads of two people had been switched using Photoshop. He didn’t get his laugh; what he got was a stunned silence.

“This is a very, very dangerous piece of software in the wrong hands,” an executive  finally said, breaking the silence. The news pictures editor assured us that very strict rules had been issued to the field to ensure that Photoshop was used only to clean up pictures and that in no way would manipulation be permitted. And from my experience that was the case although how could one ever really be sure.

But the recent incidents have again shown how Photoshop can be used for manipulation. My guess is that those who used it were stringers (freelance photographers) and not agency staff photographers. But then the agencies buy in so many pictures these days because they simply don’t have enough of their own people (budget cuts will do that) so then you have the problem of dealing with people who might not have the same ethics as home base.

And because so many stringer pictures are being used, and the means of transmission has improved so much (that 60 minutes to transmit a color picture from the Middle East is now less than a minute today) so in turn the main editing desk gets flooded with a load it simply cannot handle – handle that is as far as doing a true editing job as opposed to button-pushing (sending the picture out to clients).

This writer belongs to the school that a photo agency service should be judged on its quality rather than its quantity. That it is the job of the photo editor on the desk to make the choice of what is the best picture of several showing a similar event, and send that out. And I believe more than ever that photo editors on the receiving end appreciate that type of service more and more.

This writer looks at newspapers every day, including during busy news days like airport terrorist plots and a war in the Middle East,  and yet the number of agency pictures used can be counted on one hand. There is an awful lot of waste going on out there; an awful amount of money being spent on buying in stringer pictures that shouldn’t really see the light of the day,

The manipulated pictures have the agencies reviewing their filing procedures; it should go deeper – they should review if there really are good business reasons to transmit the volume they are. Do the clients really want so much?

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