Rand Simberg of TCS Dailyoffers a modest proposal for ensuring the veracity of news photos:
As tools advance — and the recent spate of CGI movies from Hollywood and other film centers should demonstrate this explosion of technology — and people, including unscrupulous and ideological people, learn to use them, it will in fact be much more difficult to know whether or not a published picture accurately represents the event that it purports to show.
How, then, to know if a published photo is, in a paraphrase of the old commercial, real, or Memorex?
There are no obvious easy solutions to this problem, other than the traditional ones for validating evidence — chains of custody. Press photographers could be required to use certified cameras that time stamp pictures in an encrypted way that doesn’t permit modifying the stamp. They could go to accredited image processors who would verify the validity of the original picture from the camera (perhaps even uploading it to a certified notary storage site), and describe any image processing they performed, at risk of loss of accreditation if they pull any funny business. This would, of course, come at a cost, in both dollars for the intermediary and (more importantly for the news business) timeliness. Unfortunately, in the wake of this and other news bias scandals, any news organization that doesn’t pull in the reins on its stringers and freelancers, and implement a solution like this, is going to suffer in credibility as time goes on.
Anyone else have any feasible ideas?
