Editorial

Twister video illustrates pitfalls of digital media

Thursday, July 10, 2008

Those of us who have been around the newsroom a few years sometimes have to marvel.

At one time, we purchased about 100 feet of bulk, black-and-white 35 mm film every four days. Today, the last rolls of color film we purchased are stashed away in a closet, having reached its expiration date four years ago, and the only film cameras in the building are part of an impromptu museum display.

Coupled with the Internet, digital photography has changed the distribution of news immensely. For this newspaper, it means four-color photographs can be rolling off the press only a few minutes after they were snapped.

But as far back as the 1984 Summer Olympics, when digital photography came into its own, there were ethical questions about the electronic retouching of photos to a level not possible in the old darkroom days.

So it was not surprising the issue has migrated into the digital movie medium, manifesting itself in a video of a tornado last weekend.

A storm chaser sold the video, purported to be a twister near Valentine, to AP for $295.

Unfortunately for the storm chaser, after it was distributed by AP, CBS and NBC, another man recognized the video as a doctored version of one he took in Kansas four years ago. The image had been flipped, power lines added, trees subtracted and the action speeded up.

What started as a newsworthy image just turned out to be a case of creative editing.

Convinced of the fraud, AP and the other outlets pulled the video from distribution.

Should news consumers be concerned? Certainly, we should be skeptical of anything we hear or see, especially on the still-maturing Internet.

And, the incident should serve as a warning to professional news organizations to redouble their effort to determine the accuracy of the information they distribute.

But the same system that distributed the images proved to be the perpetrator's downfall. There's no keeping secrets when the Internet is involved, as many politicians are learning during this election cycle. Electronic identification can even make the detection of copyright violations an automatice process.

Despite the extensive doctoring, the original videographer easily recognized his work and notified the proper people.

AP's quick action is reassuring, and only raised the news service's reliability in our mind.

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