WASINGTON, DC (November 21, 2008) – Today the Associated Press lifted its ban on U.S. military handout photographs after the Pentagon assured the wire service that it would avoid distributing altered images to the news media.
AP has also strengthened its internal procedures for "ensuring the integrity of photos from outside sources," the news cooperative said today.
Santiago Lyon, AP's director of photography in New York, said he spoke with Pentagon press secretary Goeff Morrell, who assured Lyon that the military's service branches would be reminded of a Department of Defense policy that prohibits making changes to photographs if doing so misrepresents the circumstances or facts of an event.
The DOD instruction says, according to AP, that "Anything that weakens or casts doubt on the credibility of official DOD imagery in or outside the DOD shall not be tolerated."
The DOD says that images can still be altered by the military to protect privacy or for security, however.
AP's internal policy, described to staff members yesterday in a company memo, includes the instructions that from now on at least two editors must examine any photographs coming from the DOD or other outside sources in Photoshop before transmitting the pictures on the network. If there is any doubt about the integrity of an image it will not be used, AP said.
"AP pictures must always tell the truth," Lyon wrote to the staff.
AP's new policy on handouts also says that in the rare case that they decide to distribute a handout image that's known to have been altered, say for its news value or the alteration itself has news value, that the caption will clearly explain that it is an altered image.
The ban on DOD handout photos began last week when a photograph of America's first female four-star general, Ann Dunwoody, was provided to AP and distributed on the network before it was discovered that the picture had been altered. The background behind Dunwoody had been changed from an office environment to instead show her in front of a billowing American flag, and her three-star rank had been removed from her uniform.
It was the second case of altered DOD photographs in two months.
The first incident was in September when the DOD provided handout photos of two soldiers killed in Iraq.
Dead were Staff Sgt. Darris Dawson, 24, and Sgt. Wesley R. Durban, 26. The face and shoulders of Dawson were pasted onto the picture of Durban, as the two images were identical except for the faces.
Both the Dunwoody altered photo and the altered photos of the dead soldiers were spotted by photography editor Bob Owen at the San Antonio Express-News. When the images were discovered in September and again in November, AP put out an immediate "kill" notice on the images and began investigating.
