Who said a photo never lies?

It’s an affront to readers and photographers alike when a newspaper or magazine uses photography to tell a lie. Such dishonesty ranges from publishing a picture that amounts to mild misrepresentation, through to running one that is itself entirely fake.

At the low-end of the scale are the file pictures pretending to be current, or those that are loosely captioned because they aren’t quite of the moment in time they should be, or the photograph of an isolated incident that doesn’t fairly represent the bigger picture but is published anyway because of its attention-grabbing charms.

What we thankfully see less of are examples from the high-end of the scale: the outright and unadulterated lie. But here’s one that is simply off the charts.

That’s about as egregious as it gets and it’s an argument against media self-regulation if I’ve ever seen one — and unearthing it is MediaWatch at its best.

wade@wadelaube.com

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