Unrest at the Simon Bolivar International Bridge near Cucuta, using two different filters. Photo: FAIR.
By Jim Naureckas – May 26, 2023
If youâre working for establishment media covering an official enemy of the United States, your main job is to convey to your audience that such places are dystopias, where everyone is miserable and whatever economic punishment Washington imposes on them canât make things any worse.
The problem is that many of these enemies are tropical countries that often have sunny weather and lush greenery. If you run a realistic photo of such places, people might get the idea that things donât look so bad there, and could even start wondering whether the living hell described in your text is a completely accurate portrayal.
Thatâs why corporate media have hit on a simple trick: If you want people to think that a country resistant to US leadership is a festering doomscape, just underexpose the hell out of your photographs.
So when the New York Times (12/5/20) covers an election in Venezuela, it sets the scene with a photo that looks like this:
Whereas, when you take the same image and run it through the automatic exposure adjustment filter of a popular photo editor (in this case PicMonkey), you get this:
When the Times (4/3/19) showed Venezuelans protesting on a bridge to Colombiaâa bridge that was the focus of heavy anti-Maduro propaganda efforts (FAIR.org, 2/9/19)âthe photo would have originally looked something like this:
But thanks to the magic of digital editing, the sunshine-soaked protest could be drenched in shadow, the better to convey the oppression the demonstrators were struggling against:
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Or say you have a photo essay (New York Times,  11/27/20) on a mother and son displaced from Colombia to Venezuela by the Covid pandemic. You want to run a photo of the boy in Venezuela with the caption, â
Thereâs an easy solution: Just turn down the brightness until it looks like the photo was taken during a total eclipse of the Sun, and youâve got the image as it appeared in the Times:
The Times uses this trick a lot in covering Venezuela (see FAIR.org, 3/26/19, 12/19/20), but it works just as well in other countriesâeither enemy nations, or maybe nations that just have enemies within them. Hereâs the image that illustrated a Times piece (4/30/23; see FAIR.org, 5/12/23) on Brazil with the classic red-baiting headline, âIf You Donât Use Your Land, These Marxists May Take It.â
Naturally, you donât want that photo with exposure properly adjusted, because that would give the impression that the (perfectly legal) land reform the Times is describing was taking place in a land thatâs not under a Mordor-like permanent shadow:
While the New York Times is the king of underexposed photos, itâs far from the only outlet to turn down the brightness in pursuit of propaganda. The Atlantic (2/27/20) ran a piece about Venezuela by Anne Applebaum, explaining how its âcitizens of a once-prosperous nation live amid the havoc created by socialism, illiberal nationalism and political polarization,â that was accompanied by this photo:
If it had run the photo with a normal exposure, Venezuela would have seemed to have at least 50% less havoc:
The Wall Street Journal (8/10/22) ran an article about lithium mining in Chileâs Atacama Desert, where serious concerns about the environment stand in the way of efficient extraction of resources by multinational corporations (FAIR.org, 8/23/22)âor, as the Journal put it, public companies ârisk mismanaging the resource in a region where state-run firms have long been mired in corruption and nepotism.â The piece was headed by a photo of one of the evaporation ponds from which lithium is extracted:
Deserts, of course, are typically bright, sunny placesâbut running a realistically lit photo of a lithium mine isnât going to give the reader the proper image of a location âmired in corruptionâ:
Back when China was still trying to wipe out Covid, Reuters (12/20/21) ran a piece about daily coronavirus cases in China falling from 102 to 81. Though this was a tiny fraction of the number of Covid cases at the time in the USâwhich recorded some 241,000 new cases that December 20âwe were still supposed to read this as bad news, which you can tell because the accompanying photo looked like this:
As opposed to a normally adjusted version of the photo, which has a much less ominous tone:
While the darkening technique is usually used on photographs from official enemy nations, it can also be used with internal enemies. When the New Yorker (9/13/15) ran a profile by film critic Anthony Lane of thenâBritish Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, which compared him to âthe class grouch, making trouble but never headway,â someone who makes âyou all roll your eyes whenever he raises his hand, because you know whatâs coming next,â it was accompanied by this image:
With an ordinary exposure applied to the photo, Corbyn doesnât look nearly so much like someone whom you would naturally shun:
Itâs easy to see how this basic processing of images serves these outletsâ ideological needsâexploiting the crude association between dark and bad. (Remember in 1994 when Time magazine darkened OJ Simpsonâs skin when they put his mugshot on the cover after his arrest?) But applying this sort of distortion is inherently unethical, since the basic principle of photojournalism is that photos are supposed to convey reality and not political spin. As the Code of Ethics of the National Press Photographers Association spells out:
Editing should maintain the integrity of the photographic imagesâ content and context. Do not manipulate images or add or alter sound in any way that can mislead viewers or misrepresent subjects.
If ethics alone arenât enough to deter establishment media from such distortion, they should consider how much uglier photographs are when theyâre steeped in unnecessary murk. Again and again, when I adjusted the brightness on obviously underexposed photos, it rescued the images from the one-dimensional cartoons they were run as, revealing detail, atmosphere, humanity. The properly exposed photos provided views of real people in real placesâbut, of course, if your intention is to publish propaganda, thatâs the last thing you want.
(FAIR)
