Fox News Fakes Protest Images

by Brant Watson

2020-06-14

I ran across an image on Reddit that was on the Fox News homepage. People were accusing it of being badly photoshopped so I downloaded it to take a look.

../../../../_images/fox_fake_2.jpg

Okay well - that dude does really look kinda odd there. So I zoomed in a bit:

../../../../_images/fox_fake_2_z.jpg

Haha okay. Yea. That’s completely terrible. They didn’t even try that hard. Maybe it was just supposed to be a recreation or something, although at the time there wasn’t anything on the website saying so. Such weird faking is a pretty interesting story all on it’s own. But then…

Someone else on a totally different subreddit posted another link to a Fox News article which included this image:

../../../../_images/fox_fake_1.jpg

I noticed something pretty funny. I bet you can too! I mean, wow this guy really gets around to protests, AND he is really good at staying in the same pose!

This time though they don’t even bother trying to smooth out the sides. Someone spent less time with this edit than the other one, clipping the dudes arm off partially:

../../../../_images/fox_fake_1_z.jpg

Hilariously Fake.

Here, let me help fix the fake for you Fox News. I’m available for hire and my skills are going to top this shoddy work.

../../../../_images/fox_fake_1_fix.jpg

It took less than 10 seconds to fake this better.

I’m not a professor journalistic ethics or anything but this seems pretty disingenuous. Going back to one of the stories now: https://www.foxnews.com/us/black-lives-matter-protesters-seattle-chaz-hijacked-message I see they have changed the images and now include the following apology

Editor’s Note: A FoxNews.com home page photo collage which originally accompanied this story included multiple scenes from Seattle’s “Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone” and of wreckage following recent riots. The collage did not clearly delineate between these images, and has since been replaced. In addition, a recent slideshow depicting scenes from Seattle mistakenly included a picture from St. Paul, Minnesota. Fox News regrets these errors.

I don’t think you should have altered images on any news story even if you put a note under it saying that you made up the image. Journalism deserves much better than this.