What's Wrong With This Picture?

President Barak Obama stood alone on a Gulf Coast beach, hearing only the waves and his own inner voice. The solitary scene just reinforced his isolation as the expanding oil slick threatens to overwhelm his connection with coastal residents and recovery managers….

If an old aphorism is true, I am owed 957 more words to complete the phony analysis I began in the preceding paragraph - phony, because the picture I’m describing is itself a fraud.

Reproduced above is the cover of June 19th issue of The Economist, based on a May 28th photo by Reuters journalist Larry Downing. I say "based," because what The Economist printed is not the image Downing recorded.

The Economist is a blue-blooded British weekly aimed at a Brahman caste of international executives and policy makers, with unsigned articles of a rather pedantic tone. On the whole, The Economist might be considered somewhat witty. But on the 19th of last month they were too clever for their own good, and ours.

In Downing’s original shot, Obama is not only not alone, he is actively engaged in a conversation with coastal resident Charlotte Randolph as U.S.C.G. Admiral Thad Allen listens. But Randolph and Allen, not instantly recognizable and in postures nowhere near as dramatic as Obama’s, had to go.

The photographic trickery was exposed Monday by Jeremy Peters of The New York Times. According to Peters, Economist Deputy Editor Emma Duncan offered this rationale:

“I was editing the paper* the week we ran the image of President Obama with the oil rig in the background. Yes, Charlotte Randolph was edited out of the image (Admiral Allen was removed by the crop). We removed her not to make a political point, but because the presence of an unknown woman would have been puzzling to readers.

“We often edit the photos we use on our covers, for one of two reasons. Sometimes — as with a cover we ran on March 27 on U.S. health care, with Mr. Obama with a bandage round his head — it’s an obvious joke. Sometimes — as with an image of President Chavez on May 15 on which we darkened the background, or with our ‘It’s time’ cover endorsing Mr. Obama, from which the background was removed altogether — it is to bring out the central character. We don’t edit photos in order to mislead.

“I asked for Ms. Randolph to be removed because I wanted readers to focus on Mr. Obama, not because I wanted to make him look isolated. That wasn’t the point of the story. ‘The damage beyond the spill’ referred to on the cover, and examined in the cover leader, was the damage not to Mr. Obama, but to business in America.”

[*Though The Economist is a glossy magazine, its publishers refer to it as a newspaper.]

Just to be perfectly clear, the news service photographer had no part in the photograph’s alteration; in fact, it would be against Reuters policy to make such a change without management approval and the consent of the subjects. The Economist's Emma Duncan is the one who made the call.

Her call was fundamentally dishonest, intellectually and journalistically, and her explanation seems, well…thin. Her editorial standards are apparently humor (“…an obvious joke.”) and emphasis (“…bring out the central character.”), but during a long career in journalism I have had it emphasized to me, as I’ve emphasized to others, that there’s nothing funny about misrepresenting reality. That applies especially to visual media, where only half of the graphic’s intended message is under editorial control; it is the viewer, a creature with sometimes quirky predispositions, whose personal context completes the interpretive experience. No two people would write the same thousand words.

There is no denying that we live in a Photoshop age. A moderately astute adolescent with a couple hundred bucks can manipulate images in ways unavailable to the CIA less than a generation ago. There’s no dishonesty in doing so in the name of art or entertainment. Just don’t do it and call the image news.

I remember an interview with film director James Cameron several years ago in which he was commenting on advances in digital graphic technology. He was, he told the interviewer, sincerely worried about the future of our democracy. The power to completely rearrange elements within the frame long after the image is recorded left him wondering whether voters could ever trust their eyes again.

In 2004 there was no doubt in many minds that presidential candidate John Kerry and certified veteran-annoyer Jane Fonda once shared the same antiwar podium. The incontrovertible evidence, a grainy newspaper photo from the early ‘70s, was in fact a modern digital paste-up job using file photos snapped a year apart. A lot of smart people, and an exponentially larger number of the not-so-smart, were completely taken in. It was clear case of technological dishonesty in the service of political slime-mongers. It was James Cameron's nightmare.

In a larger scheme of things, the only apparent harm arising from The Economist cover is to the publication itself. Politically, not enough of the American electorate reads it for the misimpression to have meaningful effect. And while there needs to be a sustained cry for more editorial integrity among the world’s visual media, it’s a sad fact that committed visual propagandists will always have their ways of making the unreal look real, and us look like fools for believing it.

The next time an image – especially one purporting to depict newsworthy or politically sensitive events – amazes, appalls or inspires you, ask yourself: is there any particular person, entity or point of view that stands to gain by your reaction (or a similar reaction from others) and, if so, to what degree? That’s the first step in answering the question, Is it real?

Looking Back Like Lincoln

Independence Day is the occasion for a traditional patriotic exercise, and I’m not talking about the hike from the parking lot to the fireworks venue. I refer to an intellectual exercise, as this is the day we meditate on our founding documents and the way they express our bond as a nation. While I yield to no one in my admiration of the majesty and genius of the Declaration of Independence and Constitution, another uniquely American document just might be my favorite. While not part of our charter, it’s a big part of our national character. My choice is a speech.

Abraham Lincoln was a great admirer of the nation’s founders with a firsthand appreciation of their moral fiber. That’s why in the fall of 1863 it took him just slightly more than two minutes, standing among the graves of America’s newest national cemetery, on America’s saddest battlefield, to summarize the nation’s founding dreams and current duties: liberty and equality for all, and “the unfinished work…the great task” of bringing freedom to fruition and establishing an enduring government of, by and for us.

Lincoln was three years old when we again fought the British for American freedom in the War of 1812. John Adams and Thomas Jefferson lived until Lincoln was 17, and for him their historic work was as much current affairs as it was history. He knew just how far the young nation had come in a short period of time. If you doubt how keenly one might appraise the trajectories of events 87 years removed, give it a try from our current point on the timeline:

Four score and seven years ago…

• American Robert Millikan won the Nobel Prize in Physics for his work to determine the elementary charge of an atom and the photoelectric effect, work that helped establish the basis for modern particle physics;
• Working in Pittsburgh, immigrant Vladimir Zworykin perfected a design he would patent as “Television Systems”;
• Col. Jacob Schick patented the first electric shaver;
• Roy and Walt Disney founded the Disney Company and established Disney Studios;
• Born were actress Jean Stapleton, pilot Chuck Yeager, Project Mercury astronauts Alan Shepard and Wally Schirra, Senator Bob Dole, game show host Bob Barker, gossip columnist Liz Smith, television producer Aaron Spelling, novelist Joseph Heller, Notre Dame football coach Ara Parseghian, former U.S. Secretary of State and Nobel Peace Price winner Henry Kissinger, and actor Don Adams;
• Yankee Stadium hosted its first baseball game.

To a grateful beneficiary of events three generations past – both momentous and mundane – those events convey a heightened contextual awareness. Lincoln was looking back four score and seven years to find parallels between one war and another, a moral continuity from era to era, and his context was insightful.

Our own equivalent look back finds an equally informative parallel, for 87 years ago all America was scandalized by another vast pool of oil. It was during an affair called Teapot Dome in which, without competitive bids and influenced by bribes, the secretary of the interior leased vast U.S. Navy underground oil reserves to a pair of petroleum tycoons. The oil fields were eventually restored to the government and, more significantly, in the scandal's wake the Supreme Court established Congress’ power to conduct investigations, issue subpoenas and compel testimony under pain of fine and imprisonment.

There’s a scant 60 year gap – that’s three score – separating the date of Lincoln’s address from the earliest date of our modern four score and seven year retrospective. Though slightly more mature and blessed by progress, despite our considerable global reach we are still an adolescent nation. Of the 12 founding members of NATO, we are the fifth youngest.

But we are old enough to remember our dreams and duties as well as Lincoln did at Gettysburg. And to remember that he, like the founding fathers whose memory he invoked, got it right.

Of Science and Society

In mid-June, the president nominated a blue ribbon panel for his BP Deepwater Horizon Oil Spill and Offshore Drilling Commission. Its members are all accomplished professionals: a longtime environmental activist with an M.F.S. from the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies; a Ph.D. marine scientist from the University of Maryland; a National Geographic Society executive vice president with a J.D.; a Harvard School of Engineering and Applied Sciences dean with a Ph.D. in physics; and a Chancellor of the University of Alaska Anchorage, a J.D. diplomate. The commission’s co-chairs are former Florida Senator Bob Graham and former EPA administrator William Reilly – both Harvard-trained lawyers.

Shortly after their appointment, Yahoo! News headlined an analytical piece, “Obama spill panel big on policy, not engineering.” The article pointedly implied that the environmentally-aware commissioners had an axe to grind. Only in the final sentence of the 811-word article was there a hint of moderation, and that from former George W. Bush science advisor John Marburger: "It's not really a technical commission. It's a commission that's more oriented to understanding the regulatory and organizational framework, which clearly has a major bearing on the incident."

That article, posted for comment on Facebook, drew this remark from noted astrophysicist and science popularizer Neil deGrasse Tyson: “The value of politicians and policy makers to society is over-valued compared with that of scientists and engineers.”

Would that statement include the geophysicists and engineers at BP? I will stipulate that they are world-class in their fields and in no way ill-intentioned. But their talents – and, as is now clear, their better instincts – were co-opted by private sector bosses (including their top boss, noted geologist Dr. Tony Hayward) whose allegiance lay with stock values, not social values. I would suggest that good politics, which includes good oversight, goes a long way toward enabling good science in the global interest.

I don’t imagine Dr. Tyson really meant to denigrate the many mutual successes of science and public policy which have created genuine national value. As in 1933, when New York politicians established The American Museum of Natural History Planetarium Authority and thereby the Hayden Planetarium, the Central Park West address where Tyson reports for work each day. In 2001 and 2004, respectively, it took political will to create national commissions on the aerospace industry and space exploration on which a certain astrophysicist, apparently recognizing the value of thoughtful public policy, enjoyed a high-profile role.

It takes national will – political will – to create the financial and policy framework in which science gets to accomplish the “hard” things JFK spoke of, with often spectacular results. But sometimes the opposite is true, with significant societal consequences. Edward Teller was chief among a legion of scientists of high pedigree who urged the continued pumping of extravagant public funds down the Strategic Defense Initiative (“Star Wars”) rathole. Craig Venter’s synthetic biology is exciting, but I’m relying on public policymakers to establish safeguards against any potential health and security consequences.

The Gulf mess is actually proof that commercial technologies putatively applied in the national interest, and the public policies under which they are deployed, must both be robust in order for the effort to retain its societal merit. A multinational corporation and a Minerals Management Service, each awash in scientists and engineers, left us awash in oil. Both inside and outside of government, science has to do better.

Dr. Tyson, as an avid follower of your work, I admire the truly valuable public-sector science you practice and preach; I know my neighbors and I will never look at trans-Neptunian objects the same way again. But, with respect, I submit that technology and society advance best when science and politics coexist in a spirit of mutuality, reciprocity and consent.