Friday, January 14, 2005

As you probably know, faked tsunami photos have made their way around the Internet and into the mainstream press. What we in the news business need in these fledgling days of "citizen journalism" is some way to help identify fakes before they end up on the front page of newspapers and news websites.

Over at Cyberjournalist.net, Jon Dube points back to a July 2004 New York Times story about developments in identifying when a digital photo has been altered. Technology eventually will help weed out some of the obvious fakes, but as the Times article points out, a sophisticated spoofer who knows what he's doing probably can fool the best tools.

A trained photo editor with common sense, knowledge of the Internet, and equipped with software to help identify simple fakes may be journalism's best line of defense.

With those tsunami photos, software wouldn't have done much good. They were real images of people watching a big wave on a Chinese river, not the December tsunami. Editors puzzling over those photos might have saved some embarrassment by doing a careful image archive search, or checking a rumor site like Snopes.com.
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