"The alteration of photos for propaganda purposes has been with us as long as photography itself; it is not an invention of the digital age," documentary filmmaker Errol Morris wrote in 2008. "But while digitally altered photographs can easily fool the eye, they often leave telltale footprints that allow them to be unmasked as forgeries."His comment came to mind today in light of the news that the Associated Press canned one of its Pulitzer Prize-winning photographers upon learning that he had digitally manipulated a photo taken last September in Syria. Compared to other high profile photoshopping scandals, Narciso Contreras's betrayal of trust did not seem all that offensive—all he did, according to the AP's own report, was remove a colleague's camera from the bottom left corner of the image.Whether or not you think that kind of digital manipulation was egregious enough to warrant jettisoning a man who by all accounts is an otherwise talented and courageous photojournalist, the AP's position was clear: it was a violation of the organization's values and principles, so he had to go. Not only that, his entire library of work for the AP was stricken from their public record, never to be made available for commercial licensing or public search on the organization's archive again.This final point about removing Contreras's work from the visible archive of the AP's history is particularly compelling. The AP, it seems, acted so swiftly and harshly because it has a reputation to uphold. It's not only "the definitive source," by its own description, but also "the world’s most trusted news organization." And to its credit, the AP acted with commendable transparency by openly reporting on its own snafu.But still: did it have to strike all of his work from the public record? Even asking that question feels woefully behind the times, because his images will certainly find many other homes online in the coming months. The AP's decision to remove itself from that equation, however, limits its own ability to help tell the story—either of Contreras himself or of the work he produced.That's perfectly legitimate, but it raises a troubling question about what people as news consumers will look for in a service like the AP in the coming years. During the firestorm of coverage of the Boston bombing and its fallout last April, Ben Smith and John Herrman of BuzzFeed wrote an intelligently provocative piece arguing "the media doesn't own the story anymore.""The job of a news organization—and of a citizen—has changed with frightening speed in a world where information is everywhere; where the tip line is public; where the distinction between source, subject, and publisher has blurred; and where, crucially, questionable reports and anonymous postings are part of the fabric of that story," the two argued.The AP claimed that it scoured almost 500 other images of Contreras's after he claim clean about his manipulation and found no evidence of additional fraud. But after rereading these pieces by Morris, Herrman, and Smith, the paranoid side of me can't help but wonder if it took down the rest of his images because they were scared of clever sleuths unearthing something else.That's a pretty cynical (if not straight up ridiculous) thought, but that's the whole point: the media doesn't own the story anymore. Pretending that hundreds of his photographs simply no longer exist might aim to reinstate a sense of trust in something like the Associated Press, but it could have the exact opposite effect for many people.Remember that another one of the journalists producing some of the most groundbreaking work on Syria now is Brown Moses, a blogger who made a name for himself, in part, by crowdsourcing footage and images from social media. I don't know what the alternative should be to gutting a journalist's entire catalog after a mistake is made, but it should leave material open to ongoing interrogation like this now that we all finally recognize that digital photography can't be trusted anyway.
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