The danger in photo manipulation

Michael Roth

michaeljoroth@gmail.com

 

A long time ago, seeing was believing for observers of journalism. When you were able to find photographic evidence of an event, it was believed to be the truth.

Today, with applications like Photoshop and other editing systems it is incredibly easy to create a fake image that holds zero truth at all to it.

Novices like me or you can change simple photos to make things look slightly different to tell a different story. I could add a basketball, change a line on a field and plenty of other simple changes.

Experts can create what is called 'deep fakes' which are serious manipulation that hold zero truth at all and create images or videos that appear incredibly real, yet hold no truth at all.

These editing systems are incredibly powerful and if put into the wrong hands, can completely falsify images and videos and cause confusion for their audiences.

Picture source : Awful Announcing

                                                                  

Sports are commonly used for doctored images to try and quickly fool sports fans. This photo here is from Awful Announcing and shows that somebody made a fake ESPN page to trick fans into thinking that the Washington Football Team (literally named) decided to change their name from Redskins to Redhawks. This turned out to be false and ESPN never ran such story, but this screen-shot makes it appear so.

Another commonly used trick used on twitter is when a random person changes their name to a sports reporter, switches their profile picture to that reporter and posts believable but false news. @docmccockiner is famous for tricking reporters such as Scripps graduate Peter King by portraying himself as Ian Rappaport, an NFL Network reporter. This article, shows King getting duped by fake Antonio Brown news where he was falsely quoted by saying "I don't listen to no Trump supporters."

Fake photos and videos are not the only types of visual media that journalists must question before using. Newsrooms have very difficult ethical decisions to make when deciding to release graphic, yet very real, photos. In the Nieman reports article, Gary Knight is quoted as saying "If you’re performing that role as a photographer or journalist, as some sort of witness or commentator, I think you need to record those things. But I don’t think that they need to be published." The question on whether to publish these graphic images is one producers must answer constantly, when reporting on stories of death and destruction.