The Economist manipulated the photo of Viktor Orbán

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On 16th December 2010, The Economist published the article Hungry for power about Viktor Orbán, the Hungarian Prime Minister.

A newspaper should present facts, without any attempts to influence the emotions and beliefs of the readers via non-factual ways. Of course, this is not true when a newspaper publishes a subjective opinion, specifying the person or group where the opinion originates from. This is not the case with the article "Hungry for power". It is an article of the print edition of The Economist.

The article intentionally presents Orbán in the role of a dictator, using a graphically manipulated photo, with the caption "Orban's coming for you". This is not presenting factual information anymore: it is an attempt to influence the readers negatively against the Prime Minister. (Do not argue that the caption and/or photo is meant to be a joke or ironical; everyone knows that there is no place for such elements in serious articles such as this. Regardless of its success, the intention of the edited photo is to manipulate emotions, this is totally obvious.)



Experts agree that the original photo of AFP has been manipulated (related Hungarian article). In what follows, my post is based on this Hungarian video of a news channel (even if you don't understand Hungarian, the video can still be useful because of its visual content).

The photographer of AFP, Ferenc Isza, was asked about the issue. He told that the photos they take are kept intact, but once the photo is purchased by a third party, the buyer (as an owner of the photo) may freely apply changes on it.

The original photo was taken in a speech of Orbán on 7th September 2010. The expert László Petromán told that the manipulated photo of The Economist is the result of a nonlinear image transformation, which is capable of e.g. making an evil grimace from a tired, troubled face. Mr. Petromán has shown examples as well (see below, or the video I linked). The first example is the changing of sky clouds in bright sunshine to clouds that look like storm clouds. The second example is about Gyurcsany, former socialistic prime minister of Hungary.



This reminded me to the following rhetorical question:

Yes, as we can see, certain anti-Orbán powers behind the scenes are capable of influencing the international press to such an extent. The Economist published a manipulated photo, which obviously tries to increase the emotional impact of the content of the article. This is a shame. (The Economist was asked about this issue, but they haven't reacted to the questions at all.)

I hope those readers who might have been influenced by Ragusa's anti-Orbán "sources" and "collections" (various links to various sites) in the thread about Hungary's media law now see that the situation is not black & white. The sources you may think "unbiased" are also influenced greatly by certain powerful international forces. This is what I've been saying from the beginning, by the way. Some people seem to be so naive and delude themselves into thinking that e.g. the media law criticism of certain organizations and governments (especially the German one) only has to do with the media law. The actual reasons are deeper/different and even might be unrelated with the apparent subject of their attacks. Such is international politics.

 

The clouds and evil grimace guy just look like they've been Photoshopped to decrease brightness / increase contrast, which, while in itself may make a person look somewhat more sinsiter (I wish I could post a before-after pic here of someone we all know for example purposes), doesn't IMO rise to the level of faking a photo.

The picture of Orbán, however, looks to me like it has plainly been faked with the severely creased brow and so on. Danger! Bad guy here!

 

You may have a point there. Perhaps they used more advanced techniques for Orbán, resulting in a better manipulated yet more natural photo, where the manipulation is much harder to notice (unless you know how Orbán really looks like).

 

Can you provide some reliable source in English, that other users on this board can read? Watched the video and it told me nothing at all (given that I can't speak Hungarian), other than how to lighten and darken photos. Big deal. Couldn't quickly find any English source - googling "Photo economist orban" came up with two economist articles and this thread. I know how much media organisations like to make news out of nothing - for all I know this HirTV might be doing it here. I'm no image expert, so can't tell for myself.

What would be interesting is seeing the original photo, which this manipulation is mean to have come from.

 

The Economist is obviously a (neo)liberal newspaper. The Economist routinely says bad things about Orbán's policies*, so they must have done so on purpose to make Orbán look bad - or something along that line. Proof that the world is unfairly biased against you, Orbán and Hungary (in that order). You're facing a global conspiracy. But I rest assured that you will stand tall.

Newsflash for you Baronius: All major newspapers nowadays photoshop their images. They all do. The Economist edited an image of Orbán? I'm shocked, just shocked!

PS: Have they already made lèse-majesté a crime in Hungary again?

Spoiler

* bad things like: Hungry for power - The government takes over Hungary’s independent institutions, one by one (incidentally the article with that photo)

Constituting a problem - The government clashes with the courts

# i.e. the Orbán government wants to levy taxes that would be found unconstitutional like that last one that got struck down, so they withdrew court jurisdiction for such matters.

 

All the political scheming aside, the photos are overly dramatized at best; and an example of biased and poor journalism at worst.

Something that happens all the time.

This is still about selling News...just like Dolce and Banana is about selling fancy looking threads...

 

I think the issue that needs to be addressed is what amounts to acceptable photoshopping. As Ragusa pointed out, just about everyone photoshops these days, but generally it's airbrushing, altering contrast/brightness for a clearer picture, etc., not altering significant content. This can be seen in the photos you linked, Baronius. The politician with the before/after photos looks like he went from a normal person who is trying to pretend he's happy when he isn't to someone about to throw up and trying to hide it. Unless the news article was about his health, it's not photoshopping for content. The clouds go through a drastic change, but I'm betting that was only used to set a mood somewhere. The newspaper got lazy and didn't bother to actually find threatening stormclouds, but again, not edited for significant content. On the other hand, the AP photos that came out when Israel stormed that ship were edited for content, albeit more simply. Bloody knives were cropped out of the photo, leaving only the violence of the Israeli soldiers visible. I don't want to re-start that debate, but given the nature of the associated articles, I think that's definitely editing for significant content.

Likewise, the photo of Orbán was edited for content. I haven't seen the before, but in the video it looked like Orbán was a regular human being. In the photo, he looks like an evil muppet. That is wrong. That is going from reporting the news to making the news. It's bad enough that most news organizations today will decide they know what you need to know better than you do, but when they just start making stuff up, and faking evidence to prove it, that's unacceptable.

Mind you, I don't think that, by itself, is justification for the crack-down on the press in Hungary. Maybe grounds for a libel lawsuit (the photo is a printed claim that Orbán ever looked like that).

 

NOG,
the image to an article is not reporting, it is often a montage, artwork or worked over to meet the tone or narrative of the article. That's nothing unusual. It's silly to call that sloppy reporting because it isn't reporting. It has more to do with layout.

I mean, Baronius, probably by accident, got it just right, it is exceedingly probable that the Economist worked over the photo to serve as a thematic image i.e. to make it's expression meet the the tone or narrative of the article. That's normal journalistic practice. What's the effing big deal? In doing so the Economist isn't making things up.

Point is, Baronius probably doesn't like the article anyway, and then finds fault in the photo because it meets the tone - trying to discredit the article as biased because of the picture. In doing so he morphs from wing nut to avid defender of journalistic integrity (and of Hungary's new censorship law). Never mind the picture, is anything they write in that article factually wrong? Probably not, and therein lies the problem for Baronius. So he goes after the low hanging fruit - that 'manipulated image'.

~*~​

In contrast, some real abuse of photo shop: In 2009 a French gazette, Paris Match, showed topless pics of Sarcozy bathing, and they brushed his love handles away.

​

Le Figaro removed a ring from the hand of a French minister.

[Pic removed as the site it was included from has been infected with malware. -Tal]

 

Really! The media, at least some outlets, being biased against a political leader? I never heard of anything like that!

 

Unfortunately, as you can see, they try to hide or deny what happened, that is why you can't find any English sources. Actually, as it was expected, The Economist has good lawyers who found it a good idea to deny the whole case (today, Economist officially denies what HirTV states, stating that the photo is original!).

For a start, you can believe me that the video was about the manipulation. Even some original pictures of the September event are visible in the beginning of the video, too bad that the archived streamed video quality is too low.

Spokesman of the government, Szijjartó said that they got used to such manipulations. I suppose they won't try to attack the manipulated photo legally.

Regarding the clouds and grinning of Gyurcsany, let me again emphasize that the graphical expert provided them as examples to the image transformation in the video I linked. (Not that the image transformation magically makes an evil look for everything and everyone!) He told that the same type of transformation was used on Orbán too (just probably more professionally and carefully -- this is my addition).

It is a fact that we all see that the content of the photo was edited to make Orbán look "evil" to the readers of the article. This is unacceptable emotional manipulation, and not just a little "photoshopping" with cosmetic changes. It is a shame that while Ragusa attacks any potentially-problematic law with the strongest criticism, he apparently finds it acceptable that the media/press MANIPULATES readers with edited images:

Ragusa cannot deny either that the purpose of editing the photo was to make a bad image of Viktor Orbán whose policies were criticized in the article. Shouldn't such a newspaper article be presenting strict facts without showing bias to the interests of any person or group, similarly to a good law which is not biased to the interests of any person or group?! The media and press -- considering the number of people it may influence -- has a similar (even if different type of) serious responsibility as a law. Double standards, Ragusa?

On a side note, shouldn't the part of international press which attacks Orbán so much try to SET A POSITIVE EXAMPLE by presenting objective articles (i.e. without photo content manipulation)? Instead they choose to abuse their press freedom, something that they "protect" so preciously "from Orbán".

 

Clearly, the Economist needs to be censored.

Haven't they egregiously abused their press freedom with that outrageous article? Oh wait, they aren't even a Hungarian newspaper! Anyway! They also publish on the internet! Dang! The law needs an amendment allowing to block sites that are biased from being received in Hungary! After all they do or might, now or in the future, publish things that are already or could in the future perhaps be potentially misleading to the Hungarian people, endangering the youth and public decency (and contradicting the speaker's office of the Hungarian prime minister)! Foreign media are a loophole that left and liberal mis- and disinformers, the mockers and scoffers and enemies of the Hungarian people (who will have their day of reckoning, just wait) could ruthlessly exploit to spread confusion and doubt about the glorious new revolution in Hungary, subversively undermining it! Obviously the media law doesn't nearly go far enough!

These false journalists at the Economist brazenly photoshopped (or didn't) dear leader Orbán in a way that was disadvantageous. Totally unacceptable. Instead, they should have used Photoshop in the way Paris Match used it on Sarcozy instead!

 

Not really. The editor-in-chief determines the final "presentation" of content. It's really his/her call. If you bought your own newspaper and presented nothing but dry facts of events to the public you would be out of business in 2 weeks. The "facts" of any event are certainly important, but hardly the only thing that publications provide in their content. Everything in the media has some sort of influence over the general public, even fiction and content that is clearly labled as such. Sometimes, fiction is even more powerful than just the presentation of raw facts. I think you may want to consider that there are many aspects of "influence" in the public's point of view, and that a retouched photo is of minor importance in the larger scheme of things.

 

It is a weekly newspaper. It should provide news, not manipulation. You say its mission (not "it's", by the way) is to sell copies, fine, but it should respect the basic guidelines of objective reporting.

You pretend that such manipulated photos are a normal thing, Ragusa even tries to hijack my point about the photo by taking his newest Viagra, the Hungarian media law. The funniest thing is that while both of you says "it's not a big deal", you had problems with the not-yet-legally-formally-examined media law.

I think every honest reader will practically disagree here: a weekly newspaper should present facts without "highlighting" its bias by edited, faked photos.

Yes, but a line must be drawn. There is always a limit.*
Raw facts can be presented interestingly without faking photos or using emotional and explicit terms to make it more colourful. For example, I believe HirTV in Hungary (regardless of the fact it's closer to centre-right than to anything else) always presented facts in a pretty objective way, without adding its own manipulations. (The same is not true to the left media, or to the -- illegal websites of the -- extreme-right forces. By the way, the most infamous antisemitic/racist website of extreme-right forces is hosted on an American server, and the US government could not do anything against it, despite of the fact that the Hungarian government requested its removal several times.)

*(In today's world where money tries to rule everything, the limit is pretty tolerant. If someone (such as Orbán) tries to make it less tolerant, the money-makers and their puppets immediately cry "dictature!". I hope Orbán will be able to establish his changes, possibly with minor amendments, of course.)

-------

We somehow returned again to the question of "what is allowed" and "what is not allowed". To me, it looks like that many (but not all) of those who are citizens of Western countries (and posted in my recent topics) accept that whatever money dictates should be fine usually; or in a slightly more refined wording: the tolerance line should be very high (this is what we call very liberal in Hungary). I'm more conservative in this matter. I think democracy can be ensured without giving an endless freedom to the media and press to manipulate whatever they want. The main point where we would disagree here is the question of what is "endless", I suppose. I don't think it has a point arguing about it. If you are fine with your children watching disgusting reality shows and other junk, and your media exclusively serving the interests of big companies, it is fine for me. Just don't expect the same from Hungary, which kingdom was founded more than 1000 years ago, with long-established traditions and language.

 

By whom? The problem is that ultimately someone has to decide what matter of content is "allowed" for everyone else. Personally, I'd rather make that decision for myself.

 

Consequently, you say that you want to decide what content is allowed for yourself, and everyone else can do the same for themselves. I agree. On the other hand, some problematic scenarios:
- In broadcast applications (e.g. TV channels), some parents can't just check what their children are watching, and can't just instruct them to watch channels with less junk. This is why the amount of junk a channel can broadcast should be restricted in my opinion. While such an element in a law would surely not be accepted in the USA and in several other countries, I hope it will take effect in Hungary.
- Very many people are greatly influenced by what they read and see, often based on emotions. (This is what Economist also abuses when faking Orbán's photo with that manipulative caption.) We can't just tell "it is their problem if they're stupid people and believe everything". The objectiveness of newspapers and media should get a minimal lower limit that's enforced. Otherwise, only money will decide: if you can afford to own an own media (or get majority in the ownership of one), you can feed the people (who read it/watch it/listen to it) with whatever subtle lies you wish.

 

I'm a bit confused here. The thread is about a retouched photo, but now you are asking about children's programming. To me, these are two diffrent issues. Which are we debating?

 

If your reaction to "what is allowed" has been strictly context-dependent, then just refer to my second paragraph ("Very many people..."). Sorry if I've added it later, I edited my post a bit in the past two minutes.

My point is, the way The Economist manipulated the photo is not acceptable. Darion, NOG, and Gaear also agreed that it's overly manipulated, not just a little harmless photoshopping. If you ask me whether I would restrict this type of manipulation: the newspaper shouldn't get too high penalty or sanctioning for it, but such manipulation should not be encouraged for sure.

 

That's ok, I understand.

That is really besides the point. Adults can decide for themselves what they wish to see and hear; children really cannot, since adult guidance is an important piece of what should be censored for them. In this instance, context means a great deal. I'm an adult, and as such, I don't need anyone else to make these decisions for me.

 

So do you say you prefer to filter the manipulated content yourself (allowing much freedom to the publishers) than expecting the publisher to offer strictly factual news?

I agree that every child -- while brought up -- should be taught to filter and interpret content he or she reads/hears, but there are some basic guidelines which media and press must follow. There should be a limit how subjective (= potentially manipulating) such organizations can be. They have responsibility when they present information. I still say: a newspaper or weekly newspaper should present facts in articles that are not designated as personal or subjective opinions.

All in all, primary news articles should NOT reflect the intention of emotionally influencing the readers. News must be factual. This is a fundamental principle of media and press, no matter from what aspect we approach it.