Denver News Crew Accidentally Livens Up Broadcast With An Inappropriate Image 'Borrowed' From The Web

Too Much Free Time

from the of-the-two-titles-presented,-I-know-which-one-I'd-be-more-likely-to-read dept

It’s a well known fact that many people mistake Google’s image search for a license-free stock photo repository. Of course, many people are unaware (or simply uninterested) in the nuances of copyright law, making liberal borrowing of images the norm, rather than the exception.

On the other hand, members of industries that rely on the protection of copyright laws shouldn’t have to be reminded that “running an image search” is not even in the same neighborhood as “properly sourcing a photo.” This distinction is even more important if you’re in a business that relies on integrity, along with various IP laws. Having a staffer just grab an image from “The Internet” for use during a news broadcast could, at the very least, put you in the situation of having to pay up and apologize publicly for using someone else’s photo without permission. At worst, you could find yourself on the receiving end of a lawsuit.

Somewhere in between these two situations lies another scenario: the photo picked hurriedly from the lineup presented by Google Image search is quite possibly THE WORST PHOTO THAT COULD HAVE BEEN CHOSEN. Charles Apple of the American Copy Editors Society has the details on how grabbing a random image resulted in some serious embarrassment for a Denver news team.

The folks at Denver’s ABC-affiliated 7News last night ran a story about the David Petraeus sex scandal, his “mistress,” Paula Broadwell, and her biography of Patraeus, All In.

Except instead of pulling an actual copy of the book cover, somebody just ran a Google search and pulled in the first thing they found. Which, unfortunately for 7News, was an altered copy of the book cover.

On the left, here, is the actual book cover. On the right is that image 7News pulled, most likely from a Google search.

Now, this sort of thing could have happened to anybody, but it really shouldn’t be happening to professionals. But, as Apple points out, this sort of sloppy work is far from rare and he’s got a long, long, incredibly long list of links to prove it (scroll towards the bottom of the page). A combination of careless image sourcing and less-than-thorough copy editing resulted in a situation that was likely much, much funnier to everyone not employed in certain positions at KMGH-TV. The news director has since offered an apology for the “regrettable and embarrassing error” and has promised to take steps to make sure this sort of mistake doesn’t happen again.

Well, we’ll see. Apple’s list contains a lot of repeat offenders. In the meantime, KMGH-TV can be happy it accidentally added a bit of levity to its viewers’ lives and added to the pantheon of screw-ups forever enshrined on the web.

Filed Under: copying, images, internet