Back in the day, we shot film. And you Got what you Got. If you blew your exposure or focus, you didn’t Get. I learned a lot of painful lessons back then, but it forced me to get better at my job. Now in previous decades, retouching negatives had always been a thing in the commercial world, but you didn’t dare mess with that in the news world. If you manipulated anything on your transparency using the Dark Arts of the Dark Room, it could destroy your integrity and credibility. Nobody would hire you again if they knew you’d done something to your film that artificially modified a news story. In 1986 I think, Life Magazine ran an image on the cover of its A Day in the Life of America issue. Some photographer out west had been handed one of the first digital 35mm cameras from Kodak to beta test it on this project. It worked fine and the guy got some nice shots. In fact, one was even run on the cover. Impressive. However, violating a core expectation of news shooters, the guy did not get both horizontal and vertical images of his subject. I think it was a shot of a cowboy on a horse going by a cactus silhouetted by the setting sun or something. Life’s photo editor loved it so much that he insisted it be used for the cover. Only problem was, the shot he wanted was a horizontal and the cover page was formatted for a vertical. Hmmmmm….what to do?

Well, rudimentary editing software was also being developed at this time for what was then known as “desktop publishing.” Think super-basic elementary Photoshop where you could do a handful of stuff in there to pick up your photos a little. And that’s what Life did. They manipulated the image to fit the cover, changing it from a horizontal to a vertical, but failed to mention it to anybody. As it turned out, it leaked, made news in all the trade journals and Life was pilloried in the industry. (Yeah, just for that.)

Today, minor editing for exposure and color is standard in the business. It’s not a big deal. But like any technical process, it’s vulnerable to abuse. And over the last 20 years, the abuse has been approaching the level of Normal. (Lots of Photoshop truth robbing got spotted in Gaza. Remember this? Everywhere else, too.) Sometimes you never know if what you’re looking at is really what was there. And naturally this practice in Photo has leached over into the practice of Reporting. It’s taken a while, but now we’re demonstrably living in the world of mainstream News/Bias, where standard hard news mixed with opinion, innuendo and partisanship is just simply considered…The News. 

Now I’m old enough to remember how the breach of this trust in 2005-2006 canned the career of Dan Rather, who was kind of like the most trusted guy in news at the time. But like a cryogenically stored body thawed out once they discover the cure for cancer, Rather has re-emerged in recent years because a cure has been found for the truth. Which, it seems, is no longer as valuable as the motive behind the story. In other words, your news stories are now fables with a message instead of simple news stories. Dan Rather wanted to tell a story about George Bush that wasn’t supported by his native tongue (JD from Sam Houston State Teacher’s College), so he decided to blaze a new trail and incorporate “his truth” into the mix so that the “greater truth” could spread. Great idea. Too bad he was too avant-garde for his peers then.