It’s kind of sad that you can’t trust your own eyes. Last week I saw a documentary about the demise of community newspapers and one participant in the documentary said that he doesn’t trust national news but he trusts his local paper because he knows the reporter/owner and that she’ll report the (real) news to them. One of the most powerful ways the reporter for the Canadian Record presented the news was the images that she posted in her stories.

For the Record by Heather Courtney
For the Record by Heather Courtney

And just in case one is under the illusion that not trusting the news is anything new, I remember a professor in one of my journalism classes relayed a story about how one of the Los Angeles newspapers (you know it’s a long time ago because there was more than one local paper in Los Angeles!) said that they didn’t even bother sending a reporter to cover the political race of the party that the paper didn’t support, so they editorialized the news by what they didn’t cover or publish. That’s a story about the history of journalism and not strictly about evaluating images and videos, but it is part of the process of knowing the source of the images or videos that you’re looking at. Of course when we go from local printed newspapers to the World Wide Web the problem of trust grows exponentially. I had no idea that the Civil War images attributed to Matthew Brady were often posed and not otherwise manipulated. Ugh.

Crash Course Navigating Digital Information - Episode 7 - Evaluating Images and Videos- Civil War images manipulated
Crash Course Navigating Digital Information – Episode 7 – Evaluating Images and Videos- Civil War images manipulated

The story about someone posting an image of a shark swimming along a flooded highway reminded me of all the videos I saw of the flooded Las Vegas garage after flash floods in 2022. 

Crash Course Navigating Digital Information - Episode 7 - Evaluating Images and Videos-Flooded Highway Shark
Crash Course Navigating Digital Information – Episode 7 – Evaluating Images and Videos-Flooded Highway Shark

When we had flooding this past month, I looked carefully to see if any videos from the previous year were being “repurposed” for the current event. Apparently the garage at the Linq hotel floods every time. Ack. 

One thing I didn’t know was that you can do an image search directly in the Chrome browser if you want to look for the source for suspicious images. Alas, how many of us are using social networking apps and not browsers. Ugh. 

Crash Course Navigating Digital Information - Episode 7 - Evaluating Images and Videos-image search in Google
Crash Course Navigating Digital Information – Episode 7 – Evaluating Images and Videos-image search in Google

So, just like everything else, if something looks extraordinary or hard to believe, double check the source and especially the full context of the original image or video. What’s that famous quote… 

abraham lincoln-don't believe everything on the internet just because it has a image and a quote

What image or video have you found on the Internet that turned out to be fake? What incredible image or video did you find that proved to be true?

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