A Storm of Misinformation

Previous posts have discussed how the Internet can accelerate the flow of misinformation. See the site "Is Twitter Wrong?"

A previous post noted fake pictures of the dead Osama bin Laden. More photo trickery blew in with the hurricane. At Salon, Laura Miller writes:

Even before Hurricane Sandy hit the East Coast, the bogus photos began to circulate on Twitter and Facebook, with several getting picked up by professional media outlets. There was a ‘shopped image of the Statue of Liberty with an ominous cloud swirling behind it and a perfectly legit photo of Midtown Manhattan menaced by a similarly dark cloud — although that picture was snapped over a year ago. An inspirational image of servicemen guarding the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier turned out to have been taken on some other, more ordinary rainy day.

Added to the mix as the day progressed were raging rumors, many of which turned out to be true, about water-filled subway tunnels,mysterious explosions and the devastation of swaths of the Rockaways. However, some of these stories — of an impending Manhattan-wide power shutdown and the flooding of the stock exchange, among others — turned out to be fake, the work of a Twitter habitue who posts under the pseudonym @ComfortablySmug. He was later revealed by BuzzFeed to be Shashank Tripathi, a hedge-fund analyst and campaign manager for Christopher R. Wight, a Republican candidate for the House of Representatives.

 Paul Farhi writes at The Washington Post:

In the Twitter age, bad news travels fast. Even when the bad news isn’t really news at all.
Such was the case at the peak of the storm’s wrath Monday night as rumor and fallacy swirled like autumn leaves. Around 8 p.m., as Sandy was belting New Jersey and New York City, a tweet appeared: “BREAKING: Confirmed flooding on NYSE. The trading floor is flooded under more than 3 feet of water.”

It’s unclear whether the tweet, which came from the account of someone screen-named “Comfortablysmug,” was the first public report of a potential disaster at the world’s largest stock exchange, but it was the most influential. In the globally linked game of telephone that is social media, Comfortablysmug’s report was retweeted more than 600 times, reaching millions of people. Among those in the retweet chain: The Washington Post’s Capital Weather Gang.

And soon, the story had made the leap from social media to the mass media. CNN forecaster Chad Myers mentioned it during Piers Morgan’s program, drawing expressions of amazement from Morgan (“Wow!”) and Erin Burnett (“Incredible”). The Weather Channel also aired a version of the story.

Except no such thing had happened

Publishing Grisly Photos

Our chapter on foreign policy and national security notes that photos of prisoner abuse at Abu Ghraib prison intensified opposition to the Iraq War.  A comparable incident has come of the war in Afghanistan, as The New York Times reports:

The grisly photographs of American soldiers posing with the body parts of Afghan insurgents during a 2010 deployment in Afghanistan were the source of a dispute between The Los Angeles Times and the Pentagon lasting weeks.

Two of the 18 photographs given to the paper were published Wednesday by The Times over fierce objections by military officials who said that the photographs could incite violence. The officials had asked The Times not to publish any of the photographs, a fact that the defense secretary, Leon E. Panetta, reiterated on Wednesday as the images spread across the Internet.
“The reason for that is those kinds of photos are used by the enemy to incite violence, and lives have been lost as the result of the publication of similar photos,” Mr. Panetta said at a news conference.

But the newspaper’s editors said that the photographs were newsworthy. “We considered this very carefully,” the newspaper’s editor, Davan Maharaj, said in a Web chat with readers. “At the end of the day, our job is to publish information that our readers need to make informed decisions. We have a particular duty to report vigorously and impartially on all aspects of the American mission in Afghanistan. On balance, in this case, we felt that the public interest here was served by publishing a limited, but representative sample of these photos, along with a story explaining the circumstances under which they were taken.”

Here is LA Times online discussion, along with Twitter responses.

The LA Times adds:

There were no immediate reports of violence in Afghanistan in response to the photos. ManyAfghans, especially those in rural areas, do not have Internet access or electricity. The country's main evening news broadcasts did not show the photos.

Magazine Alters Photo of the President

In our chapter on mass media, we discuss ways in which technological developments have affected journalism. Because it is now so easy to alter photographs, news organizations now confront photography increasingly presents issues of ethics and accuracy. The New York Times reports:

It was the ideal metaphor for a politically troubled president.

There was President Obama on the cover of the June 19 issue of The Economist, standing alone on a Louisiana beach, head down, looking forlornly at the ground.

The problem was, he was not actually alone. The photograph was just edited to make it look that way.

The unaltered image, shot on May 28 by a Reuters photographer, Larry Downing, shows Adm. Thad W. Allen of the Coast Guard and Charlotte Randolph, a local parish president, standing alongside the president. But in the image that appeared on The Economist’s cover, Admiral Allen and Ms. Randolph had been scrubbed out, replaced by the blue water of the Gulf of Mexico.

At Daily Kos, Jed Lewison is critical:

This isn't the biggest deal in the world, but there's really no excuse for bending facts to support a narrative. Digital image processing can be a great way to make a point, but it's wrong to create a fake image and pass it off as real to an unsuspecting audience. That's the kind of thing we'd expect from the Iranian government -- and they really aren't the guys you want to emulate.

At Politics Daily, Walter Shapiro is less concerned:

We all live in a Photoshopped century. Unfeigned reality has become a rarity at the upper levels of politics and celebrity. Sometimes it seems like the "authors" of half the books on the nonfiction bestseller list did little more than hire an expensive ghostwriter and grudgingly answer some questions into a tape recorder. Believing in a model political marriage (Al Gore, this carbon offset is for you) is truly the triumph of hope over experience. On cable TV, the political discourse is dominated by hosts (soon to include the disgraced Eliot Spitzer) who exude the kind of ideological certainty about everything that used to be associated only with heavy brainwashing.

White House image-makers would not allow FDR to be photographed in a wheelchair, presidential pictures have almost always been a triumph of stagecraft.