News photos and credibility
A picture may be worth a thousand words, but a photo released publicly March 10 and killed within hours by international news agencies may have launched a thousand conspiracy theories. Worse, it has shaken the public trust at a time when people need something to believe in.
The family photo of the Princess of Wales and her three children was posted to social media by Kensington Palace with a message claiming the image had been taken by Prince William.
Later that same day, Getty, Reuters, Associated Press and AFP removed the photo from circulation, stating it did not meet their editorial standards.
On March 11, Kensington Palace posted a message signed C, indicating it was from Kate, reading, "Like many amateur photographers, I do occasionally experiment with editing. I wanted to express my apologies for any confusion the family photograph we shared yesterday caused."
Some reacting to the controversy wonder how releasing this photoshopped photo to the public is any different than the Instagram filtered or Ai-assisted images found across the Internet.
Photographs for marketing, advertising or art, however, have different standards than news photos.
“As for image manipulation, what image isn’t ‘photoshopped’ these days?” Mark Sheldon, a fellow of the Royal Photographic Society, asked during a 2020 interview for the society. “Everyone uses Photoshop or the iphone equivalent of it. Even in the darkroom, we would manipulate images.”
(Interestingly, a member and patron of the Royal Photographic Society happens to be Kate, the Princess of Wales, herself.)
The difference between a Tiktok influencer’s makeup tutorial, say, and news photography is that the latter is selling credibility.
In these times where the words “fake news” are bandied about by people who are more apt to believe a wild conspiracy on Facebook than they are scientifically backed advice from their local health authority, being precise about the who, what, where, why and how something happened is more important than ever.
That was the crux of the matter for Reuters, whose picture editors said when they noticed inconsistencies in how the image lined up, they could not immediately verify how, why or by whom the photo manipulation occurred.
According to Reuters’ Handbook of Journalism, its photo editors only use Photoshop sparingly, to crop and size photos, or balance the tone and colour. This is a journalism industry standard.
Cropping out a random bystander is acceptable. Copying in a person, who it can’t be confirmed was even there, is akin to defrauding our readers. We’re not saying that’s what happened in this case, but neither do we have proof what part of that image is real.
News photos, and journalism in general, have a duty to record the truth. As journalists, if we can’t verify where something came from, we should say so. If we get it wrong, we should issue a correction and/or kill the item in question.
In the case of the March 10 Royal Family photo, all was not picture perfect.