The New York Times's Gilded Age
The New York Times embarrassed itself again last week. A photo essay in the July 5 Sunday magazine purported to document America's "second Gilded Age"--i.e., the real estate bubble which, having now popped, has left countless high-end construction projects in a state of half-completion. The essay and an accompanying slideshow on the paper's website were promoted as the work of a Portuguese photographer, Edgar Martins, whom the Times had commissioned to produce the feature and who, in the words of a Times editorial note, "creates his images with long exposures but without digital manipulation."
As schadenfreude over the real estate meltdown remains at a high pitch, these pictures of unfinished McMansions abandoned in mid-hammer blow were understandably more popular than the typical Times magazine article, and the online slideshow was widely linked to by other websites. The editorial note was curious, in retrospect. Imagine if the paper were to preface its articles with a note specifying that the reporter has created the work by the sweat of his own brow, without spin or plagiarism. The effect is to invite extra scrutiny. (Remember the Gary Hart presidential campaign of 1987-88? Dogged by rumors he was having an affair, Hart told reporters, "Follow me around. I don't care. I'm serious. If anybody wants to put a tail on me, go ahead. They'll be very bored.")
Scrutiny of the Times first came from a computer geek in Minnesota, Adam Gurno, who reads and posts at the MetaFilter blog under the screenname "unixrat." "I'll eat my hat if this is not fakery," "unixrat" wrote. He had noticed a curious symmetry in one of the photos (which upon close examination also shows up in several others). Look at "the wiring and the woodgrain," on the left and right halves of the photo, he said; "98% of it is identical. . . . There's simply no way to build a house with studs having mirror-identical wood grain and electrical wiring with matching running. Furthermore, it would be the most pointless idea ever--all that stuff will be covered by drywall and invisible to the homebuyer. No one will pay 500% more to have mirrored framing that they literally cannot see." Gurno was right, and produced a simple animation showing that the photographer had used Photoshop or some other digital manipulation software to create the mirror image--the two halves of the house were not that similar.
In an interview with blogger Simon Owens, Gurno later disclaimed any particular knowledge of photography, though he does know a bit about framing a house. More important, he said, "When you do computer programming there's an old maxim that to 10,000 eyes all bugs are shallow. . . . What it means is that if you have a lot of people looking at it they'll find all the bugs in your program, and I think the same goes for this. If I wouldn't have found it then someone else would have found it."
The Times shortly thereafter acknowledged in an editor's note that
A reader [had] discovered on close examination that one of the pictures was digitally altered, apparently for aesthetic reasons. Editors later confronted the photographer and determined that most of the images did not wholly reflect the reality they purported to show. Had the editors known that the photographs had been digitally manipulated, they would not have published the picture essay, which has been removed from NYTimes.com.
This is not quite the end of the story, as far as THE SCRAPBOOK is concerned. We looked at the slideshow before the Times took it down and while we enjoyed it, we were focused on something other than digital manipulation: The subjects of the photos were striking but we were not blown away by the artistry of the photographs themselves.
Our reaction: For this the Times had hired a photographer who happens to be based in Bedford, England, and paid for him to fly to a handful of construction sites around the United States? We don't know what Martins's fee and travel expenses must have been, but the Times could surely have produced a similar feature by hiring freelance professionals in the locales where the photos were taken for some small fraction of what they must have spent on Martins.
For a paper known to be bleeding cash, and which has barely kept its creditors at bay this year, it seemed a rather extravagant feature, even before it turned out also to have been based on misrepresentation. The Times, ironically, has vividly documented a new "Gilded Age." Its own.
Book Alert!
Our colleague Christopher Cald-well's Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Immigration, Islam and the West (Doubleday) is now out--400 pages of must-reading that's also fascinating reading. The book was first published a couple of months ago in Great Britain, where it was well-received despite its failure to accord with--or even to respect--the dictates of political correctness. It deserves a wide and serious readership here, too. It's a truly rare combination of ground-truth reporting about--and historically and sociologically informed analysis of--the state of Europe today.
One of our astute colleagues puts it well. The book, he says, "has the highest number of penetrating insights per page of any book he's read," which will come as no surprise to readers who have appreciated Caldwell's writing in these pages, where he has been a valued contributor since the magazine's birth in 1995.
So, if you want to engage seriously in the big debates about politics, society, and religion in the 21st century--you can't leave home without Caldwell's Reflections.
Sentences We Didn't Finish
What has encouraged me greatly as I travel around the country, from the shaken baronies of Wall Street to the regional centers of commerce and back roads of rural America, is the common acknowledgment not just that a course correction is overdue, but that this is an exciting opportunity to construct a new model that will serve us better for the challenges ahead. To do that will mean some serious . . . " (Tom Brokaw, from his foreword to Reset: How This -Crisis Can Restore Our Values and Renew America, by Kurt Andersen).