New York Times Photographer Staged News Picture
By James T. Madore Staff Writer
The New York Times acknowledged Friday that one of its staff photographers violated journalism ethics and company policy when he had a child pose for a news photograph that was published last month in some of the paper's editions.
The controversial picture shows a 6-year-old boy aiming a toy pistol alongside a sign reading "Arabian Foods" outside a store in Lackawanna, N.Y., a suburb of Buffalo. The photo accompanied a Sept. 20 article about a group of Arab-Americans who have been accused of operating a cell of the al-Qaida terrorist network.
In a note to readers, Times editors said they had determined the photo was posed in "violation of its policy on journalistic integrity." The editors also said the photographer "acknowledged that the boy's gesture had not been spontaneous."
Staff photographer Edward Keating, who was credited in the Sept. 20 editions with taking the photo and others that ran with the story, denied that he staged any of the pictures. He said "there is no truth to these accusations. I did not pose any of the photographs I took up in Lackawanna."
Times spokeswoman Catherine Mathis declined to comment on whether Keating had been punished for breaking company policy.
Other photographs by Keating of weddings and homeless people have garnered widespread praise. His 2001 picture of a tea set covered in ash from the destroyed World Trade Center was among those by Times photographers honored with a Pulitzer Prize this year.
Mathis said publication of the staged news picture appeared to be the first of its kind in recent memory at the Times. "We have no recollection of a prior occurrence," she said.
It's common practice to pose pictures that accompany articles about gardens, cooking, celebrities, and other topics found in features and entertainment sections. But experts say posing a picture for a news story is prohibited because it doesn't reflect what truly happened.
"It's ethically outrageous," said Paul Levinson, chairman of the mass communication and media studies department at Fordham University. "This violates the basic covenant between journalism and a free society ... journalists are supposed to report the truth as it is," he said.
Levinson and others were troubled that the staged picture was published in the Times because of its large readership and influence in journalism circles.
In the mid-1990s, similar incidents are alleged to have occurred at the Los Angeles Times and ABC News. Editors at The New York Times said they were unaware the photo of the boy pointing the toy gun had been staged when they decided to use it in the Sept. 20 editions. The image only appeared in about 400,000 copies out of 1.2 million because editors dropped it from later editions. They felt it "was not relevant to the article and should not have appeared," according to the editors' note.
After the picture was published, two editors from other news organizations contacted the Times to report that their photographers said it had been posed. An internal probe that included interviews with Keating, the Times photographer, and several witnesses, failed to determine if the picture had been staged.
A second investigation began after the Times received an inquiry from the Columbia Journalism Review, which was planning a story on the incident.
Arab-American groups are angry about the episode because they say it reinforces stereotypes about immigrants teaching violence to their children.
Hussein Ibish, communications director at the American-Arab Anti-Discrimination Committee, said, "The influence of The New York Times is pretty much unparalleled, so obviously we are very concerned ... but it's good that they owned up to it."