This, This is INSANE
This has popped up about seven times in my Twitter feed this morning … the Morgantown (West Virginia) Dominion Post removed three politicians from a photo because they were running for office. The photo had nothing to so with the campaign, it had to do with a legislative bill they had co-sponsored and the governor was signing into law.
The photographer, who works for the state and provided the photo, said, “This is beyond my comprehension.” Mine, too.
The newspaper did run a “photo illustration” credit but it’s not clear if they explained what the “illustration” was. I can understand the logic behind not running photos of people who are running for office during the “political season,” even though there’s an easy argument to make that it is now always the “political season.” But to intentionally attempt to mislead your readers is insanity. Write the story, don’t use the photo. But to digitally remove three people?
Wow. Just….Wow. The sad thing is, people seam to think we do this all the time. People always ask me to photoshop them out of photos, like that is something we do. It’s cases like this that make our job harder.
And people wonder why that whole “Content Aware” crap in CS5 is a frightful thought …