2024-07-29 13:05:02
On my office wall, I have a copy of the nine-point Breaking News Consumer’s Handbook, produced by the US public radio show On the Media. The eighth point says: “Big news brings out the fakers.”
And so it was in the immediate aftermath of the assassination attempt against Donald Trump on Saturday 13 July. Among the hoaxers was a long-haired young man in glasses, who posted a video on the social media platform X (formerly Twitter) in which he pretended to be the 20-year-old from Pennsylvania who had just been named as a suspect by the FBI.
Looking straight at the camera, he said: “My name is Thomas Matthew Crooks. I hate Republicans. I hate Trump. And guess what [he leans forward, arching an eyebrow]: you got the wrong guy.”
The real Thomas Crooks had been shot dead at the scene by Secret Service agents at 6.11pm EST but, perhaps prompted by a comment on X suggesting a striking resemblance, the hoaxer put out the video in the early hours of Sunday. It seems he quickly thought better of it, removing the recording and saying it had been “a joke” that should not have been posted. By then, though, it had been shared widely across social media.
Regrettably, a screengrab from that video also made its way on to the bottom of page three of the Guardian’s print edition on the Monday, and was published on a misunderstanding that it did indeed show Crooks’s face.
This clearly should not have happened but some background may be helpful. That Sunday in the newsroom was, as I imagine was the case in most newsrooms, “frenetic”, as one editor put it. There were 14 stories being prepared relating to the shooting alone, which would be accompanied by 23 images. Amid the still unfolding details, editors were engaged in back-and-forth discussions on how best to shape the coverage for readers opening their papers about 36 hours after the attack.
For British newspapers, there was also the sound of front-page designs being torn up; even though the England men’s football team had a chance to win their first international trophy since 1966, page one of the Guardian would no longer be cleared for a souvenir cover. And whatever the result, the final whistle of the European Championships final would be blown – assuming no extra time – only 30 minutes before the paper had to hit the presses, so the news desk needed to commit to its running order for the inside pages. (In the end, the attempt on Trump’s life led the front, with an image of England’s defeat below – in reverse order to other British broadsheet papers – and continued through pages two to nine.)
The picture desk, which was handling photos for all the main stories from politics to sport, had thousands of images to consider. And on Sunday morning, when images of Crooks had yet to be released by US authorities or wire agencies, a picture editor also made a start on researching public sources. The video purporting to be Crooks was found on YouTube, from which an image was taken and placed in the photo library – but it was, rightly, marked as “restricted” and “requires verification”.
At no point did the picture desk think the video was recorded after the attack; it was a version, since deleted, that cut off before the words “guess what: you got the wrong guy”, so that significant red flag was missing. The belief was rather that it could prove to have been previously taped by Crooks and posted by persons unknown.
Pages two and three for Monday’s paper were the last to be worked on. It was now the middle of the evening, there had been a change of shifts on the picture desk, and while website editors had got the verification warning, “a series of small errors” in the swirl before deadline led to the bigger error of the image reaching print editors without the same advice. If there had been even an “inkling” of doubt, said the duty editor, it would not have been used.
An individual journalist from BBC Verify had called out the video as “an odd trolling attempt” early on the Sunday, and shortly after 7pm (UK time), PolitiFact, the factchecking unit at the Poynter Institute, published a post concluding: “The person in the video is not Crooks.” But the mistake for this newspaper was not that there was a poor verification process, rather that an image still awaiting such a process slipped through. (It transpired that a school yearbook image of Crooks had been filed by Reuters into the Guardian’s picture system in the late afternoon, so a genuine alternative was available.)
Only one reader contacted my office to query the image. Yet ironically, and perhaps indicative of a heightened suspicion about images in the era of generative AI, several others challenged the veracity of the compelling photo, displayed across four columns on the same spread, of a bloodied Trump standing beneath the US flag, raising a defiant fist into a clear blue sky. “I am concerned that this image is fabricated,” said one.
It wasn’t. It was the work of the Pulitzer prize-winning photographer Evan Vucci, of the Associated Press, who spoke about the image for a piece in last Tuesday’s newspaper.
But it is a reminder of the capacity for doubt and, while reasonable readers know mistakes may happen, extra process checks can only add to the sum of faith.
