CBS and Katie Couric Altered Pictures Controversy
CBS is taking heat for slimming down a photo of its new prime-time anchor with digital effects, after a retouched photograph of Katie Couric appeared this week in a magazine distributed to CBS stations and American Airlines flights.
The photograph in the September issue of Watch! made Couric look about 20 pounds thinner. The original photo, taken in May and showing Couric at her real weight, had been circulated to the media as an official photo.
CBS’s new anchor said she didn’t know about the manipulation until she saw the magazine.
“I liked the first picture better because there’s more of me to love,” Couric, who left NBC’s Today show to start her new job at CBS next week, told the Daily News.
Gil Schwartz, executive vice-president of communications for CBS Corp., told The Associated Press Wednesday that he attributed the alteration to an overzealous photo editor.
He said the broadcaster’s photo department has assured him it won’t happen again.
Manipulation of magazine photos is very common, Leonard Steinhorn, professor of media studies at American University in Washington, D.C., told CTV Newsnet on Wednesday.
“Open up a women’s magazine for example,” Steinhorn said. “Well, that model you see in the ad has no resemblance to what the model looks like in real life because all (sorts of) things are airbrushed out.”
The public has a responsibility to “learn how to decode these things and figure out what a manipulation is and what it isn’t,” he said. “We have to be smarter how we choose among them.”
Steinhorn said he doesn’t blame Couric for the photo.
“This is advertising but hopefully it is no way representative of what she would do in her news operation,” he said.
While editing a promotional photo of a person who provides news may be ham-handed and inappropriate, it needs to be put into the context of an advertising culture, he said.
On television, for example, images are presented in dramatic and compelling ways to make them more visually interesting, “because that’s what television is all about.”
“For example, your viewers … might think that I’m sitting here with the Capital behind me,” he said, referring to the oversize photo of the U.S. Capital behind him that serves as a backdrop. “But it’s not, it’s an image of the capital behind me.”
Steinhorn said he doesn’t think media distort truth on purpose. But media are consumers of products stages by the public relations industry, and this results in a “strange sort of alliance — almost like two scorpions in a bottle.”
“The PR industry designs (and) stages settings and backgrounds and images that the news media consumes and shows on their news all the time,” he said.
CBS, who lured Couric from NBC, has spent millions on marketing to let viewers know she’s starting her new job as an anchor at CBS on Sept. 5.