The Truth or Something Like It

Gina Thurston

gt213919@ohio.edu

"Picture Evidence"

I remember some sayings from my childhood, "A picture is worth a thousand words," or "Don't believe anything you hear, and only half of what you see." These were popular warnings suggesting two opposite beliefs. First, if there is photographic evidence, then no amount of words can prove otherwise. While the latter means that even if there is a photo, chances are, it's still phony. 

Modern-day journalists face the difficult task of navigating through what First Draft calls the "age of information disorder." The assumed bedrock of journalism fundamentals is no more. Our online-hyped world and the media sources that inundate it pose a brand new monster in the accuracy of journalism category. There used to be surefire ways around this, including photographs and video to coincide with a story to back it up, if you will, but photo/video manipulation has taken away that assurance. 

Photo Source: tomversestheworld.wordpress.com

Lies in Disguise - as news

Online platforms publish news videos and images claiming to be credible, but we are seeing more and more manipulated content. It's one thing to see a manipulated image and know it's meant to be that way. We've all seen advertisements showing a big juicy burger, but in reality you get something smooshed, flat and half the size. Perhaps an artistic or a visual design, maybe even a Kardashian looking extra svelte and having doubts, we tend to let that stuff go- but certainly when an image or video is manipulated deceitfully and passed off as authentic, big trouble ensues.

Our reading from First Draft, uses this image of Parkland shooting survivor Emma Gonzales being altered from its original version to a fake version meant to spark outrage. The real version is her tearing up a target practice from a gun range; the fake version changes the paper to our United States Constitution. Unfortunately, these fakes are quite easy with modern technology. 

Source: New York Magazine

  

These days manipulated content that helps spread mis/disinformation tends to lurk on social media platforms, which, unfortunately, is where most Americans spend their time, picking up bits of "news" as they scroll through their Facebooks, Instagrams and TikToks. Sci Tech Daily indicates that with so much competition for an audience, shock value is definitely a motive. It's become harder for fact checkers to track and detect false images/videos because there are 3.2 billion fake photos created daily for social media, along with 720,000 hours of fake video "news" footage. There's just no way to keep it off the internet and put a disclaimer every piece. This website shows several examples of photos that have been in the media recently, doctored to fit the narrative of whatever the story is. I recall seeing almost all of these on social media in the last several years.

Be your own fact checker...

We're lucky that media sources like The Washington Post and access to their Fact Checker website, but it's really up to us readers to do our own due diligence. We need to be mindful of our sources, consider our own bias towards the story (do I want this to be true?), use a reverse image search, and be cautious of the source (who posted this, and why?)