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Comment by erez | Hacker News Reader

For example, the moon landing is a subject of many conspiracy theorists who claim it was fabricated. A doctored image (esp. by NASA) published just gives them another reason to argue that there was never a moon-landing as all the images from it are obviously fake.

Second, any reporter must verify his, or her sources, otherwise they are subject to manipulation and if a source is falsifying information, for whatever reason, that information must not be used as the reported cannot know to which degree was the information tampered with. It might have been just a minor cosmetic touch-up, or it might have been a complete fabrication. So while the demand to remove from the archive a famous 43-year old image sounds odd, it's very much on par with a practise that any decent publication must follow or risk the integrity of their whole publication.

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The "doctoring" of the photo involves cropping part of the bottom away and adding a black border to the top. It was clearly done to improve the composition rather than to deceive or mislead.

If crops, borders, rotations, etc. constitute "doctoring" then virtually every publicity photo NASA releases has been doctored. And if those minor transformations aren't allowed then surely none of the composite photos from the Mars probes are acceptable either, right? Compositing is way more invasive than cropping and rotating.

At any rate, NASA has published the raw version of all their photos and therefore, everything is verifiable.

To play a slightly comical devil's advocate, what if Neil Armstrong had intentionally angled the camera down to avoid photographing their flying saucer escort? From the original it's not obvious that the area above Buzz Aldrin's helmet is black.

Yes, I know, it is really, but you don't know that from the photo, and that's an important distinction when you don't know the full context your reporting of the photo will be presented in at a future date. I think the argument is that crops and rotations are generally ok (although the argument about the upside-down footprint is interesting), but a transformation which claims to add information not originally in the photo cannot be ok.

Even a simple crop can make a large effect: http://www.abovetopsecret.com/forum/thread545972/pg1

Conspiracy theorists don't need reasons to argue.

that information must not be used as the reported cannot know to which degree was the information tampered with

Yet, in this case the reporter knows to which degree the information was tampered with - and the reporter has no problem verifying it either.

I don't know if you've ever heard of a 'bright line rule' [0] - the idea is you have a simple rule everyone can understand and interpret in the same way, instead of a nuanced rule with lots of room for interpretation.

If you use a simple-to-follow rule like "no editing except to crop and correct color balance" that's easy to understand and follow.

When you allow some manipulation as long as it's noted, editors will composite a celebrity's face onto a model's body for the front page and note it's as a fake in tiny text in a contents list three pages away. Far-fetched? Newsweek have already done it [1].

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bright_line_rule [1] http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/03/business/media/03mag.html

"Conspiracy theorists don't need reasons to argue."

Yes, but that's still no reason to release a known "fake" image. Also, you can tag it with captions and disclosures, and someone might still link to the image as "look, there's no antenna on his head unlike other photos, proving the landing is a fake".

"Yet, in this case the reporter knows to which degree the information was tampered with - and the reporter has no problem verifying it either."

Publications have a no-doctored-images policy, it doesn't allow for exceptions, even if the length of the manipulation is known, especially when the original is available.

Actually, it is the other way round - not the journalist has to know how much tampering has occured - I, the reader, have to trust the newspaper to get everything right in their reporting. Unlike in science, journalists often can not or do not want to reveal their sources and attribute every statement. Therefore, I need to be able to trust the newspaper as a whole that they have appropriate safeguards in place to detect and avoid false information and tampered images. By being holier than the pope, the newspaper supports this trust.

"Conspiracy theorists don't need reasons to argue."

And people brainwashed by mainstream propaganda don't need reasons to repeat what they've heard on TV ;-)

Except a lot of them have pretty good reasons, while those brainwashed by crackpottery don't.

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