Sometimes it seems that public trust in the media is measured the same way a bank determines an individual's credit score. The more responsible you are with money, the higher your rating. The more responsible the media is with making sure stories and images are accurate, the more the public will trust it as a source of information and news.
When a newspaper considers running an image from "joe" or "Jane" public it often scrunitizes the source carefully for any funny business. At the same time, when a newspaper selects an image from wire services such as Reuters or the Associated Press there is a pretty good chance that they can be trusted.
But how does a newspaper know that what they are getting from the wire services is legitimate?
Truth be told, when a newspaper uses a wire service image and its a fake, it's the newspaper's credibility not the wire service that suffers.
It appears this may be the case for one small newspaper in Southern Oregon, and perhaps, many others across the country. Recently, editors at the Grants Pass Daily Courier used an image they believed to be real based on the assumption that the source, The Associated Press, typically provides honest and balance news.
What's an editor to do?
The image was sensational and conveyed a message that many people in this part of the country could relate to. Juxtapose the bloogy mangled face of a man reportedly to have been bin Laden along side an image of the Twin Towers being attacked, and the narrative is complete. It's a tit for tat/cause and effect approach to page layout and picture editing.
In reality, it wouldn't have taken a lot of trouble to simply search Google images for "bin Laden death pictures" to find the fake. Even more so, it wouldn't taken a lot of time to read the "Photo Kill" order AP sent out later cautioning newspapers not to use the image.
Unfortunately, the editors at the Daily Courier missed this one.
Lessons learned
A few of the first rules journalists come to understand, usually the hard way, are (1) make sure you spell the name right, and (2) check and double check everything before publication. But here's the tricky part. In an age when everyone seems to want everything immediately, 24/7 deadlines create a culture in the news business that often throws caution to the wind, and along with it, a newspaper's credibilty.