One of the biggest stories in the news over the past month has been the controversy surrounding the shooting of Trayvon Martin. Poynter has published an article that examines how the media has used photography to portray Trayvon Martin, the victim, and George Zimmerman, the neighborhood watchman who shot and killed him.

The dominant photo of Martin shows him 13 or 14 years old, wearing a red Hollister T-shirt. Other photos, none of them recent, depict a young Martin in a youth football uniform, holding a baby and posing with a snowboard. He is the picture of innocence.

The most common photo of Zimmerman is a 2005 police mugshot. He is 22 in the photo, which was taken after he was arrested for assaulting an officer. (The charges were dropped.) He looks unhappy, if not angry.

The contrast — the two photos are often published side by side — has led to criticism that news media have tilted the story in favor of the 17-year-old victim and against the 28-year-old man who shot him.

The iconic photos of Trayvon Martin & George Zimmerman & why you may not see the others [Poynter]

German satire program Extra 3 conducted a humorous — albeit disconcerting — experiment testing photographers’ (and videographers) rights in Germany. They had an actor use a camera at different “sensitive” government locations, doing the exact same things (e.g. film the locations of security cameras) but dressed in two different outfits — first as a European tourist and then as a Middle Eastern man. The result shows that how law enforcement deals with cameras is largely determined by common prejudices.

Thanks for sending in the tip, Felix!

Boston news station WBZ-TV stirred up some controversy recently after airing a piece titled “Downtown Crossing ‘Street Photographers’ Crossing The Line?“. Apparently a viewer sent in some video showing a group of six or seven older men who regularly visit a particular crosswalk to photograph pedestrians on the street, saying that they see the men “aggressively hunting down and photographing women and children nearly every day”. The station then decided to air a piece and publish a story from this perspective, questioning the intentions of the photographers and quoting other pedestrians on the sidewalk disturbed by their behavior.
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News agency Reuters is being accused of biased reporting after it was discovered that photographs released by the agency had critical elements such as daggers, blood, and injured soldiers cropped out. The story originally broke on Little Green Footballs over the weekend.

Here’s a photograph released by Reuters showing activists attempting to take an Israeli soldier hostage:

Inspection of the original photograph reveals that three important elements were cropped out of the photograph. The first is the second injured soldier in the upper right hand corner, the second is the knife being held by an activist, and third is the large pool of blood on the wooden railing.

Here’s another photograph released by Reuters:

From looking at the original photograph, we see that a knife was cropped out of this one as well:

Reuters is no stranger to controversy, as there have been quite a few cases where photographs were retracted, with the subjects ranging from Middle East conflicts to the recent volcano eruption in Iceland.

Reuters has responded to this latest controversy on their blog, saying:

A number of readers contacted us about this. At the top and bottom you can see our initial cropped versions on the left, and the full frame versions on the right.

The images in question were made available in Istanbul, and following normal editorial practice were prepared for dissemination which included cropping at the edges. When we realized that a dagger was inadvertently cropped from the images, Reuters immediately moved the original set, as well.

Reuters has also published a series of non-cropped photographs of the raid in a slideshow.

What are your thoughts on this controversy? Do you think the daggers were “inadvertently” cropped from the images, or is this a case of biased reporting?

(via Amateur Photographer)