Recently a right-wing U.S. congressman put out some advertising supporting Trump’s tougher line on Iran and accusing Obama of having been too soft on that country. He illustrated it with a photo of a smiling Obama shaking hands with a smiling president of Iran.
The handshake never took place. The Iranian had been pasted into a real photo of Obama shaking hands with somebody else. Confronted with the proof, the politician would not apologize. “Nobody said it wasn’t Photoshopped,” he retorted.
The quaint idea that campaign photos should be considered falsified unless explicitly stated otherwise prompted a newspaper to investigate the entire topic. They apparently did not wish to use the word Photoshopped so they substituted doctored. I personally understand these two terms to mean the same thing, but as the article demonstrates, they are used in vague ways in the real world.
Certainly there is no dispute that the Obama picture was not just falsified but was intended to deceive. The article cited a similar example, this time of a Republican; her opponents altered an image to have her extending her middle finger at, presumably, all of us.
These two were clumsily done and wouldn’t have fooled any of us, I don’t think. They might fool a less sophisticated audience, which is why everyone condemns them and calls them doctored or Photoshopped.
Unfortunately, these terms get thrown around too loosely, which the newspaper was guilty of. One topic that did not come up, but which has come up several times on this list, is the amount of retouching and sharpening applied to the faces of politicians. This was particularly controversial in the presidential campaign of 2008, where each side alleged that certain magazine reproductions of the candidates’ faces were made to look particularly good or bad by choice of retouching technique.
In one case the allegation was true. A photographer admitted that she had deliberately lit a cover portrait of the late John McCain to make him look unappealing and had followed it up with retouching to emphasize it. The magazine used the shot but refused to pay for it when they found out. Is that a doctored image? Hard to say. But in all the other cases the magazines retorted that they were just applying the normal kinds of retouching that they would to any face. Unless we can read minds, it’s hard to argue with them—but people called them doctored and Photoshopped just the same.
Then there are the following categories, campaign trickery that has been around far longer than computers have.
*Running cartoons or other caricatures of the opponent.
*If a photograph of the opponent must appear, choosing the most unflattering one possible.
*Taking something the opponent said out of context, so as to attribute a belief to him that he doesn’t actually hold.
I don’t take any of these to be doctoring or Photoshopping even if there’s some peripheral involvement with a computer. The article seems to disagree. It shows two disagreeable images of Nancy Pelosi, a frequent target of the right wing—but nobody would ever believe that these images were real, the way they might with the Obama shot. No, there was no attempt to deceive. These are political cartoons that happen be based on photographs, not, as the article would have it, doctored images.
I don’t want to trash the article further but note that politicians themselves can be just as sloppy. A couple of weeks ago one Democratic candidate for president attacked another for, he said, having circulated a “doctored video” attacking him. My ears pricked up at this, because I thought he was talking about something along the lines of a video circulated by the White House last year, altered subtly to suggest that a reporter was behaving aggressively at a news conference. But no, this one merely was a snip taken out of context to falsely suggest that the candidate took a certain position.
I can tell the candidate that this happens to color authors, too. But the video snippet itself, though used unethically, had not been altered, not doctored.
To sum up my three posts on terminology in our field, accurate use is a worthy goal, but…
"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less." "The question is," said Alice, "whether you can make words mean so many different things." "The question is," said Humpty Dumpty, "which is to be master—that's all."
Dan Margulis
