A photographer claims Newsweek butchered his image of former US Vice President Dick Cheney and accuses the magazine of publishing it out of context.
Pulitzer-prize winning photographer David Hume Kennerly wrote in a New York Times blog: ‘Featured inside the magazine was a full-page, standalone picture of former US Vice President Dick Cheney, knife in hand, leaning over a bloody carving board.
‘Newsweek used it to illustrate a quote that he made about CIA interrogators. By linking that photo with Mr Cheney’s comment and giving it such prominence, they implied something sinister, macabre, or even evil was going on there.’
The photographer said Newsweek chose to crop out two-thirds of the original image – a portrait of the Cheney family in their kitchen getting ready for dinner.
Kennerly, a former contributing editor of Newsweek, accused the magazine of ‘photo fakery’. He claimed: ‘Newsweek‘s choice to run my picture a political cartoon not only embarrassed and humiliated me and ridiculed the subject of the picture, but it ultimately denigrated my profession.’
In response, a Newsweek spokesman said: ‘We doubt that any reasonable reader would, in David’s phrase, think something “sinister, macabre, or even evil” was going on in that image as presented.’
The publication denied it had altered the photo but agreed it had cropped the image, adding that this is an ‘accepted practice of photographers, editors and designers’.
‘We cropped the photograph, using editorial judgment to show the most interesting part of it.’
Newsweek said it wanted to make an ‘editorial point about Cheney’s red-blooded, steak-eating, full-throated defence of his views and values’.
For the full story visit New York Times blog
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