News Cut: How a Minnesota Man Blew the Whistle on the New York Times
Bob Collins
MPR News Cut
July 8, 2009
Whoops. It’s happened, again. A journalist /photographer working on behalf of the New York Times is suspected of faking a story. In this case, it’s photographs that appeared in the NY Times Magazine about abandoned construction projects.
A contributor to Metafilter figured out that the picture was doctored to make the unfinished room more dramatic than it apparently really was; that the photographer essentially “mirrored” the image.
The “proof” is posted here, the Metafilter poster says. (Note: The proof in the link above is not a before-and-after, it’s proof that splitting it in half and copying it to the “other side” creates the same picture as the one published as original.)
If it is a doctored image, why do photographers think they can get away with this sort of thing in the age of the Internet? There’s always someone “out there” to uncover it.
Someone like Adam Gurno of Rosemount. He’s the one who proved the image had been doctored.
How the ethical lapse came to light should be a warning to all journalists.
Read the rest of Collins’ story and listen to the accompanying interview here.