Do I dare believe my eyes?

Gosh, this has been a productive day! For those wondering why I've made so many blogs today - I've been wanting to blog for ages but alas time, frustratingly, has been against me, and illness has hampered my general ummm well life over the past week or so. I am still ill I hasten to add, but a day at home on the Internet has been handed to me today as part of my recovery before a long and busy week ahead doing TV work experience...yey!

A conversation that I had today coincided with something that cropped up in the Falmouth International Journalist MA contingents' presentation last week.

The concept was that through digital technology, tonnes of people are able to access news and media outlets easily and frequently. This means that user-generated content and contribution to the news is facilitated and used prolifically. Now, this also means, as the IJs pointed out, that people have taken the opportunity to take photographs or footage of an event, 'enhance' it through computer programmes such as Photoshop or the like and consequently have given the media tampered, unreliable 'evidence' of the event. Again, as the IJs argued, this makes it difficult for media organisations to decipher what is real and what is not, and sometimes falsified things slip through.

Take the Lebanon photos debate (see The Telegraph Blog for more details). Basically, a freelance photographer took these photos, doctored them to make the smoke look more, I don't know...bellowy and worse than it actually was, submitted them to Reuters and the media organisation used them...oblivious, at that moment in time, that the photographer had given the truth 'scope'.

Similarly, with these photos, the same photographer had apparently cloned the flares to make it seem like there were three being dropped.

This, if you read the blog from the Telegraph, was just one of the problems of inaccuracy and ambiguity about these photos.

I'm going down my route that I've taken many times now, is this such a new phenomenon? Well, no! Although the temptation of doctoring photographs (for example) is arguably more tempting now, and facilitated by people being more familiar and competent with computer technology and photo manipulation, this has been going on for years...

Fairies...really? At the bottom of the garden...? Well, it got some people going!

Two young girls, Frances Griffiths and Elsie Wright, were cousins. They took two photographs in 1917. It was to try and convince their parents that they'd genuinely been playing with fairies in the garden...as you do!

A local expert in photography was shown the pictures and said, in his opinion, they were real. Once they had received approval, the fairy images flew (harhar!) into upper class British society and circulated, well like a meandering fairy..!

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, author of the Sherlock Holmes mysteries, then caught wind of them. Doyle was a passionate believer in spiritualism, and he latched onto the images, convinced that they were conclusive photographic proof of the existence of supernatural fairy beings.

He made this argument public in an article he wrote for Strand magazine in 1920. When the girls provided him with three more fairy photographs, he wrote a second article. Doyle’s passionate belief in the authenticity of the fairy photos helped to make the two girls famous, and it sparked a national controversy that pitted spiritualists against skeptics. The photos were, of course subject to double exposure - cunning.

What's really funny about this doctoring-lark though, is that even the BBC have done it! Now, surely they're one of the ones who are meant to be setting an example in broadcasting standards, and, if they are culpable of 'giving the truth scope' then how are people meant to know right from wrong?

Well, this may be a bit deep to be fair regarding the BBC's spoof, because that's what it was; a spoof...and even the BBC's is allowed to have a little fun every now and then. You may remember though - this got people going too in 1957 .

Spaghetti...trees...really?!!

The BBC fooled the nation on April Fools' Day. They received mixed reactions to the spoof documentary posing as a Panorama investigation about spaghetti crops in Switzerland. The programme was narrated by distinguished broadcaster Richard Dimbleby and featured a family from Ticino in Switzerland performing their annual spaghetti harvest showing women picking strands of spaghetti from a tree and laying them out in the sun to dry.

Some viewers failed to see the funny side of the broadcast and criticised the BBC for airing the item on what is supposed to be a serious factual programme. Others, however, were so intrigued they wanted to find out where they could purchase their very own spaghetti bush.

Last example for now - but just don't get me started on these...

What this demonstrates though, is that doctoring photographs long precedes Photoshop and the like. It doesn't mean it's right. It does mean it's clever. Unlike the BBC and the fairy phenomenon however, the photos that are being disseminated into the news medium nowadays are not necessarily so innocuous. It's a constant danger for broadcasters that images like the ones from Lebanon could seep through into mainstream transmission. It is our job to sought out the wheat from the chaff, but it arguably becomes more difficult when there are millions of citizen journalists on the ground where professional journalists cannot be all the time.