I Appeared on a Panel Discussion With Carl Robinson and Gary Knight From ‘The Stringer’

This time last week, I had never appeared on a podcast before; now I’ve been on two. And it’s all thanks to The Stringer: The Man Who Took the Photo, a documentary questioning Nick Ut’s authorship of Napalm Girl that recently landed on Netflix.

My first appearance was on The PetaPixel Podcast with Chris Niccolls, Jordan Drake, and Jaron Schneider. I was then invited to appear on a panel discussion hosted by the Foreign Correspondents’ Club of Thailand. The two other guests? Carl Robinson and Gary Knight.

Robinson is the man driving The Stringer movie; he was the photo editor who wrote the caption on the Napalm Girl image and who says that Horst Faas told him to change the credit to Nick Ut. Knight is the Executive Director of the VII Foundation, the photo agency that produced the film, and is very much the leading man in the movie which is directed by Bao Nguyen.

If you have read my in-depth review of the The Stringer, then you will know that I have serious concerns about the claims made within it. I’ve taken some flak for the headline, but I take aim at Robinson’s motivations and cast doubt on the reenactment of the day by Index Investigations — a section of the film that has many people convinced.

While I knew the panel discussion with Robinson and Knight was going to be civilized, it was only natural that differences of opinion would surface.

Sure enough, Knight took issue with me saying that photo credit disputes like this should have a statute of limitations because the evidence becomes so thin as the years pass and people die.

“Is it not important for us to examine the historical record?” asks Knight.

Of course, I agree with that. But as I replied, the more time that passes, the more speculative the entire affair becomes.

I also questioned the reliability of the reenactment, given that in the analog era there were no timestamps or metadata. If you’ve seen it, there’s a vital cut in the ITN footage just when Nick Ut is apparently approaching the scene of “Napalm Girl,” putting him too far away. I questioned how long that cut was, whether it was 30 seconds or two minutes. Knight called the suggestion that it could be minutes “absurd.” But the truth is, nobody knows exactly how long that cut was.

Robinson took issue with something I said on The PetaPixel Podcast: that the satellite photo used to reconstruct the events on the road that day was five months old and as a result, I said things could have potentially moved — there was a war going on after all.

“I mean, so what, nothing changed that quickly in Vietnam. It was still the same cemetery, the same billboards, that was all quite accurate,” says Robinson, who then talks about the cut in the ITN footage. “I think that’s really splitting hairs, how long that shot was. [It’s] pretty obvious when you combine with the two photographers coming towards the camera crews and the girl, with Nghe on the side, it was barely a cut.”

Robinson says the “forensic stuff was a surprise to him.” Yet the reenactment is one of the most compelling pieces of evidence supporting The Stringer’s case. At the end of the discussion, the moderator Dominic Faulder asked for a show of hands by the people in attendance at the club in Bangkok to show whether they believed Nick Ut took the photo; it is my understanding that an overwhelming majority believes the stringer, Nghe, took it.