UPDATE
The Independent notified HonestReporting by email that the slide show has been taken down while editors investigate the technical issues.
An Independent update on the latest from Hebron is no big deal, but it’s accompanied by a puzzling photo slide show purporting to show “The world’s strangest guided tour highlights the abuse of Palestinians.”
None of the photos bear out any abuse of Palestinians and none of the 12 otherwise innocuous images contain captions anyway.
The title of the slideshow suggests ignorance, or at worst, actual malice.
Normally, I’d be charitable and attribute the lack of captions to a glitch. But given the slideshow’s title, the missing captions become more problematic. Captions explain what you’re looking at, but we’re left with a lack of context.
A bigger problem is a severe lack of transparency. Who provided the photos? A legitimate news service? A non-governmental organization? Are the photos recent or recycled? The lack of provenance opens the door to questions of doctoring, though these images don’t convey anything especially alarming.
Maybe the original captions tried to spin the images more perniciously. I don’t know.
But it’s in The Independent’s interest to get this right. Omitting attribution would violate the paper’s agreement with the agency which provided the photos.
The article also features a totally unrelated B’tselem video, but that’s a separate bone to pick.
We contacted The Independent for clarification.
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