The Wall Street Journal has an article (subscription - alternate links below) that nicely retells the story of the fake photo scandal currently sweeping the Chinese Internet. Taken (and doctored) by professional photographer Liu Weiqing, the photo may not have been intended to become a propaganda showpiece, but it certainly did, featuring widely in Chinese press coverage of the opening of the Tibet-Qinghai train service. To this day it graces the page devoted to the train on the website of the Chinese Embassy in the United Kingdom. Given the environmental concerns raised about the train even within China, it was a powerful image. It also won a high profile award from CCTV, as the Journal reports:

In late 2006, Mr. Liu's picture was declared a top 10 "photo of the year" by CCTV, China's state-run television network. Mr. Liu appeared in fatigues on national TV and described waiting in a pit for eight days for the antelope to pass at precisely the same moment as the train.

"I wanted to capture the harmony among the Tibetan antelope, the train, men and nature," he told the audience, standing on stage in front of a big projection of the photo.

Media critics say the photo's deeper message was hard to miss. "It's such a perfect propaganda photo," says David Bandurski a researcher at the University of Hong Kong China Media Project. "They don't tend to give journalism prizes to reports that rock the boat."

Bandurski's post on the incident is here (along with an interesting reader comment on the subjectivity of much media). The Journal goes on to recap how the manipulation was exposed online:

Suspicions about the photo became public last week after Mr. Liu's photograph was displayed in Beijing's subway system. An anonymous Chinese Internet user going by the screen name Dajiala raised questions about the photo's authenticity on one of China's largest photography Web sites.

***

His post created an online storm. Photographers blew up the image and analyzed each out-of-place pixel. Animal behaviorists weighed in, explaining that antelope are shy and noise-sensitive, and would scatter in panic at the sound of the high-speed train. When the chat-room controversy spread to China's largest Internet portals, the Chengdu Business Daily confronted Mr. Liu.

Cornered by the mounting evidence, Mr. Liu admitted he had indeed used Photoshop to blend two pictures, according to the newspaper.

***

Earlier this week, CCTV posted a statement on its Web site saying it was revoking Mr. Liu's award. On Monday, Xinhua, China's largest news organization, and several other government news organizations published an apology for circulating the photo. The companies said they would delete all of Mr. Liu's images from their databases.

"We call on the public to work together with us to uphold the authenticity principle of news reporting," the statement said. Xinhua didn't respond to requests for comment.

This is an interesting story. The Journal article discusses the origins of the photo and the photographer's apparently sincere interest in the future of the antelopes. Depending upon your inclination toward conspiracy theories, Xinhua and other Chinese media and government organizations were simply duped and appropriated what it they thought was a great image into their messaging about the train, or they were complicit in using a doctored photo that suited their agenda. Imagethief is of the inclination that negligence generally satisfies Occam's razor better than conspiracy. Thus, I find the former explanation totally believable. It also explains why Xinhua and CCTV have been so willing to offer mea culpas rather than simply participating in a mass harmonization exercise.

It is tempting to also point to this as another example of how the Internet is unfettering discourse in China. That's true, but it doesn't tell the whole story. The Internet itself isn't the only key to this. Also important is the increasing willingness of Chinese civil society to question things that would have once been beyond scrutiny, including the provenance of propaganda imageries. This is a good thing and it's useful that Internet helps to enable this, but it also requires an evolving relationship between society, government and the government's propaganda organs. Today accountability is part of the equation.

Finally, a commenter on David Bandurski's post, John Jirik, wrote:

One unexplored area of the fake photos controversy is the assumption in the accusations that somehow some photos are not fake.

But all photographs are fabricated. Constructed. Fictive. What news story is not?

Of the four forms of media content: aural, visual, audiovisual and text, the most fake is text, since it is the least real. The only real thing in a text story is the print on the page. The rest is a fiction, the processing of the myriad possibilities that the facts offer as a starting point in the myriad contexts that enable and constrain the possibilities of fabrication.

It seems to me that photos are under the hammer because they’re more easily analyzed. Unlike text, the agent and audience are less required to reason or imagine to what use the raw materials can be put and what the printed word might say. Pictures are visible and we foolishly trust our eyes. And they’re not moving, so one can peruse them more easily at one’s leisure.

So it seems to me photos are unfairly bearing the brunt of this scrutiny that should apply much more to text. Every news story is to a lesser or greater degree an abuse of trust. So why single out photographers and photo editors who are not naive enough to believe that reporting the news is telling the truth or representing reality and not hypocritical or sophisticated enough to hide what they are doing, and work in a medium that least of all allows them to get away with it.

This may seem like an unlikely point of view for a PR person, but I find this outlook a little bleak. Photography is certainly subjective, as is text. I agree that all media can and should be subject to scrutiny (really, especially anything coming from a PR agency). But I don't agree that all news stories are an abuse of trust. Subjectivity isn't the same as fictitiousness. Except for children, most of us filter for subjectivity instinctively at least to some degree. Some of us do it explicitly. That's a normal part of all communication.

But subjectivity is not necessarily exclusive with veracity, in the sense of telling the factual essence of a story. A photograph is subjective and it can be manipulated in various ways, whether in camera (how do I frame this? where do I shoot it from?) or in post (do I make it lighter or darker? crop it? paste antelopes into it?). But it can also be factual. There are either antelopes walking calmly past this train or there aren't.

Mr. Jirik is right in that we do tend to judge photographs (and video) differently than we judge text. That's both because images have the capacity to carry a much more immediate emotional impact than words and because historically photographs and film were significantly harder to edit than text, giving them implicit veracity. Technology has changed the latter but not the former, which raises some interesting potential problems. As Mr. Jirik pointed out, "we foolishly trust our eyes".

But trust is the operative word. Credibility and trust are earned, whether by personal friends, news media or governments. We assign trust to these entities based on experience over time or on reputation that has to be earned and maintained. When that trust is sometimes abused we can be quite unforgiving. The more trust we've invested, the less forgiving we are. That's why when the Weekly World News reports on a summit between JFK, Elvis and space aliens on a UFO, we don't care, but if the New York Times was to report this, we'd be disappointed (conservatives, please hold your jokes). That's also why credible news organizations act quickly when they discover they've been complicit in a betrayal of trust, such as when a Reuters photographer was discovered to have doctored photos of the 2006 war in Lebanon. Reputation and trust go together.

Governments have to play this game as well. The Chinese government and its agencies are in a position where their relationship with society is changing, and the nature of their public communication is changing to match. Chinese people have the tools and inclination to discuss the veracity of images, even ones used by the government. Xinhua may not always have had to earn and maintain trust, but today it does, even if doing that means making sure to shunt blame in this situation to the photographer.

Welcome to accountability.

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For an example of rich, text-based propaganda, look no further than this CCTV Online story on an escorted foreign media visit to Beijing's hutongs. It includes this spectacularly on-message quote from an unidentified resident:

"My salary has increased, and my house has been rebuilt, all thanks to the upcoming Beijing Olympics." said a Beijing Hutong dweller.

The rest of the article is of similarly relentlessly cheery tone, suggesting that the process of earning credibility in the Chinese media still has some ways to go.

Not as it seems... 

Not as it seems...