By Donald R. Winslow
© 2007 News Photographer magazine
Updated April 26 2007 8:42 p.m.
AUSTIN, TX (April 25, 2007) – Fresh on the heels of the digital alteration of photographs at The Toledo Blade and The New York Times comes news today that several newspapers and magazines have published a digitally altered photograph from the Virginia Tech massacre.
The image was distributed – unaltered – by the Associated Press shortly after the college shooting. It was shot by Alan Kim of The Roanoke Times. The picture was published – unaltered – by The Roanoke Times the morning after the shooting. It ran six columns on their front page.
The picture showed police and SWAT team members carrying severely injured student Kevin Sterne down a grassy slope toward safety. Sterne was blood-soaked, and his legs and abdomen were bare and bloodstained. His briefs were torn and soaked in blood. A piece of cloth could be seen dangling from his legs near his buttocks. Another item that also looked like cloth was sticking up vertically in the area of his lap.
An editor at The Roanoke Times asked if they were seeing the shot student’s penis when the picture was being considered for page one. Kim was consulted, and he examined the photo under extreme magnification on his home monitor and was convinced it was not Sterne’s genitals they were seeing. Director of photography Dan Beatty agreed. They ran the photograph and ran it large.
Meanwhile, the Associated Press was answering similar questions from subscribers. AP had delivered the picture along with an editor’s advisory noting the graphic content. AP director of photography Santiago Lyon in New York said the advisory wasn’t so much for what viewers may or may not have thought they were seeing in Sterne’s lap, but because the picture “was so very bloody.”
What editors didn’t know on Monday night was that they were seeing pieces of a bloody tourniquet. Shot in the leg by the gunman, his femoral artery severed, Sterne knew he was quickly bleeding to death. He remembered his training as an Eagle Scout in the Boy Scouts of America and used an electrical cord to fashion a tourniquet across the top of his thigh. When rescue workers arrived, they tore cloth and made another tourniquet on top of the first one. Then he was carried to safety.
As police struggled to carry the 6’ 2” tall student, soaked with blood and limp in their grips, down a grassy slope they were photographed by Kim who was positioned on the other side of the school’s drill field with an old 500mm manual-focus lens mounted on a tripod. The day was windy, the action was fast, and the lens was old. Kim said the picture was as sharp as he could make it be under the circumstances.
The slight blurring of the image and the extreme magnification may have helped editors at the New York Post, The Sun in London, and People magazine come to believe that they were seeing parts of the victim’s genitals. So they had the image doctored. Where before there was white or bloody tan content, now only green grass can be seen. The copy of the image they doctored was the one distributed – untouched – by AP.
The Sun in London ran the photograph as their entire front page. People magazine ran the picture twice: once small, on the cover as part of a three-picture combo, and then larger on the inside on page 61.
Col Allan, the executive editor of the New York Post, told The Poynter Institute for Media Studies, “We decided to make a very minor alteration to the photograph of Kevin Sterne being carried out of Norris Hall to protect the wounded student’s dignity but in no way change the news impact of the picture.”
Chris Dougherty, the director of photography for People magazine, told News Photographer magazine that the editors at People were "pretty much in agreement with the sentiments expressed by Col Allan." Dougherty said that editors at People magazine understand the seriousness of altering news photographs and he said that it is not a common practice.
"The need to be honest with the readers must always trump the needs of being tasteful or being sensitive to personal privacy," John Long said today. Long is chair of NPPA's Ethics & Standards Committee and for years has been the voice of the organization on photojournalism ethics.
"Being sensitive to the possible embarrassment of the young victim and digitally removing what might have been seen as his genitals was a noble gesture. However, in so doing People (and the New York Post, and The Sun, and other news organizations who did likewise) created a visual lie. The photograph was no longer an accurate depiction of what the photographer saw and photographed. It was a minor lie to erase that small section of the photograph, but it was a lie nonetheless and all lies damage our credibility.
"People's heart may have been in the right place but in a situation of competing 'goods,' honesty must always win. Our credibility is dependant on that. If the photograph is that offensive or tasteless, don't use it. If the photograph must run, run it and just accept that not all lemons can be made into lemonade."
When readers in Dover and New Philadelphia, OH, complained about Kim’s photograph being published in their local paper, which The Times-Reporter ran without any alteration, a subsequent story about Sterne carried this footnote:
EDITOR’S NOTE: Some Times-Reporter readers complained about the use of the Kevin Sterne photo in Tuesday’s paper, believing that it was too graphic, or that the victim was dead, or that it was simply not in good taste. The photo, used on front pages around the world, also sparked reader concerns at other newspapers. The photo was examined carefully by editors at the Roanoke (Va.) Times and the Associated Press before it was cleared for use nationally and internationally to help tell the story of tragedy at Virginia Tech.
In the last two weeks the public has learned about the mass digital alteration of news photographs at The Toledo Blade by their former staff photographer Allan Detrich, and the digital alteration last week of a six-column news photograph in The New York Times by a member of the picture desk, Roger W. Strong.
