News Literacy: Manipulated Content

Manipulated content is when the media is altered from its original form. This happens most frequently with photos, especially since Photoshop is such a commonly used tool. 

In the example to the right, the photo was Photoshopped to show evangelical Christians praying over a golden trump idol. The caption that they added was, "Evangelicals are literally praying over a golden idol." In the original photo, they were praying over actual President Trump.

The second example is an altered news chyron from CNN claiming the shooter at a Boulder, Colorado supermarket was "factually Arabic, but morally white." As you can see in the gray lettering at the top, it's from the Babylon Bee. However, this image re-circulated more recently after a gunman took hostages at a Texas synagogue.

Fox news also had a lot of pushback, when they used altered photos in their news stories about Seattle's Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone. They spliced two photos together, to represent Seattle's CHAZ as hostile and militant, which was mostly untrue. Seattle's newspaper caught the manipulation and published it in the Seattle Times.