Regret the Error

Guy Reynolds is the photo editor at the Dallas Morning News and he also writes a photography blog for its website. On Sunday, he wrote about a photo from Getty images that he discovered was altered. Not long after being informed of the problem, Getty dropped Marc Feldman, the photographer who had taken and changed the image. Feldman later followed up with Reynolds to offer his explanation of how the altered image made it onto the wire:

He said he was in the press tent processing the images when Bettencourt and his caddie stopped by to see some of the pictures. Feldman said the caddie, looking at the image in question, said it would be better if he wasn’t in it. “So I showed them how easy I could do that. I thought I just saved it to the desktop, not to the send folder,” he said. “I certainly did not mean to send both of them to Getty.”
“There was absolutely no intent to pass this off as a real image. Only a moron would have sent both,” he said. “And I would’ve done it a lot better too.”

This kind of reminds me of the story of how Clyde Haberman was fired by the New York Times. (He of course went on to have a distinguished career at the paper.) Here’s how Haberman recounted his firing by the legendary A.M. Rosenthal:

… In 1966, Abe was this paper’s metro editor.
I was its campus correspondent at City College of New York.
Abe had held the same position a generation earlier.
Like me, he had grown up in the Bronx.
He was a New Yorker through and through; never mind that he was born in Canada.
In those days, The Times published excruciatingly long lists of commencement awards presented by City College and Columbia University.
As I typed away, growing progressively more bored, I committed what would soon seem an act of career seppuku.
I invented a fake prize.
The Brett Award, I called it, “to the student who has worked hardest under a great handicap — Jake Barnes.”
You can read, or reread, Hemingway’s “Sun Also Rises” to catch the salacious reference.
The bogus award took up three lines of tiny type in the newspaper, the kind you see in baseball box scores.
But everything, no matter how insignificant, is bound to be read by somebody.
My prank certainly was.
When he learned about it, Abe lost no time summoning me to the office.
That day, the various Abes were on display.
The Old Testament Abe thundered about how I had made “a jackass” of him and the newspaper.
Never would I write for The Times again.
Never.
But there was also Abe the consoler, sad to let me go …

The lesson being that you don’t invent a fake while on company time. You never know where it’ll end up, and what it will cost you.

Check out what the “mandatory kill” order from Getty looked like:

And this is part of the caption that was added: “Attention editors: Image GYI0061084390.jpg was sent to you in error. Please do not use the image and remove it from your systems. We regret the error and apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.”

Thanks, David!

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