What You See is What You Get

For those of you who haven't yet downloaded a licensed copy of Photoshop from the Harvard network, I encourage you to do so. The image editing program will give you far more power to manipulate graphics than you thought possible. After a few hours of dabbling, even the novice can put a roommate's head on Michelangelo's David and circulate posters of the result. (Not that I would ever do such a thing, of course.) It's only after you've played with Photoshop for a while that you realize how easy it is--and how scary it is--to use; after all, if a first-time user can do reasonably good work, imagine how well the pros could alter the images we intuitively take to be real.

The pros were busy at their computers Dec. 31, when countless hours of network coverage purported to show the millennial celebrations around the globe. Instead, at least one network showed you what it wanted you to see. Image editing technology has now progressed far enough to enable real-time editing of television, and CBS made good use of it. In its live coverage of Times Square, the network digitally deleted an NBC advertisement on a large TV screen and substituted its own logo instead. The new logo looked perfectly natural--it just wasn't there.

The move, of course, led to a firestorm of criticism, not least from NBC, who had paid good money for that ad and wanted anyone looking at Times Square--whether with their own eyes or through the TV cameras--to see it. CBS argued that it hadn't acted to deceive. The coverage wasn't really news, and the NBC logo was an unimportant detail. What obligation did CBS have to advertise for its competitors? CBS Television Chair Les Moonves announced that unless it were vital to a news story, "any time there is an NBC logo on our network, we will block it."

Questions of image versus reality aren't new to television or to major media. After all, according to Christopher D. H. Row, a resident tutor in art history and theology in Kirkland House, Egyptian pharaohs used to write over their predecessors' cartouches. Perhaps in response, in more modern times National Geographic magazine digitally moved a pyramid so the picture would fit on its front cover. Television has also been no stranger to image editing: Baseball stadiums sometimes replace local ads with national ones in the television coverage. But CBS' decision raises new questions of whether television can be trusted when what network executives think is "entertainment" might be what the average viewer takes as "news." When a program presents itself as fact, as the millennium coverage did--were there really that many partiers, or did CBS add some to make the footage more dramatic?--it seems that the images it presents should be fact as well. The TV watcher should see exactly the same thing as someone standing in the middle of Times Square.

The ability to alter what we see becomes more important when the line blurs between news organizations and their business-oriented owners. Corporate-media interactions always raise questions of bias, such as when Time magazine (owned by Time Warner) hyped the movie "Twister" and other, similarly mediocre Warner Brothers movies on its front cover. We expect that when a character in a daytime soap opera uses a well-known product, it might be a product that is advertised on the network.

There's a difference, though, between avoiding unnecessary mention of competitors and straight-out eliminating their presence. CBS and NBC may be viewed as natural competitors, but in this era of media conglomerates, just about every advertisement indicates a potential friend or foe. CNN's parent company, Time Warner, after the AOL merger now controls an immense number of brands, each of which has several competitors whose logos the network could choose to suppress. Will Microsoft now vanish from CNN, and Pixar from Disney/ABC?

Not even Harvard has been immune from the epidemic of easy image editing. In the background photograph on the cover of Harvard's student telephone directory, the word "SERBIA" was blanked out and replaced with part of the word "ENGLAND." Margaret M. Murphy, directory project leader for University Information Systems, said that the cover was designed during the NATO campaign against Serbia and that "we didn't want to appear insensitive to any of the people affected by the turmoil in Eastern Europe." The intent of the change, she said, was "to not make a political statement." Of course, the move could be said to have backfired, making a simple photograph political. As Row said in an e-mail message, if the designers felt a picture mentioning Serbia "was too volatile for a Harvard audience, they should have chosen another image from the University Archives--an undoctored image--rather than present fiction as fact."

The change was not mentioned in the design credits, a choice which Row feels violates the standards of intellectual honesty "rigorously expected of Harvard's students." Perhaps the biggest sin was that the replacement wasn't done very well: The "brightness/contrast" tool in Photoshop could have lightened the obviously different background, and some more work could have removed the Serbian flag from directly above the altered word.

Neither CBS erasing its competitors nor Harvard trying to disguise Serbia is as pernicious as, say, Stalin airbrushing Trotsky out of group photos. But all attempts to change images prey on the tendency of humans to trust the camera, to assume that whatever they see is real. The loss of that trust is perhaps one of the more worrisome consequences of a few minutes' play in Photoshop.

Stephen E. Sachs '02, a Crimson editor, is a history concentrator in Quincy House.