Merely trick photography?

Over the last few weeks the British print press has been on their collective high horses about television 'faking' things. Outright fraud on telephone competitions is one thing, but debating whether Bargain Hunt is a factual documentary seemed to be worrying over-and-above the call of duty.

The story hasn't quite gone away yet - yesterday the Daily Mail was exposing the shocking fact that Nigella Lawson's new television programme was filmed, well, how can I put this delicately, in a television studio. How disgusting.

It did beg one question for me though.

Nearly all of the papers covered the story of the meerkats at Longleat taking pictures with a camera - here it is in The Sun, The Times, The Mirror and the Daily Mail. I also saw it in print in the Metro and The Telegraph.

And they nearly all carried a variation of this photograph of a meerkat using a camera.

However, the story is that the meerkat took the blurry pictures whilst the camera was left unattended, and that deputy head warden Ian Turner was 'surprised' to find the images on the memory card.

The Telegraph, for example, writes that "It is believed the shutter button was pressed by adult alpha male Monty, who usually leads the mob of eight when exploring new objects" implying that nobody really knows which individual meerkat pulled off the feat.

So, the picture of the meerkat using the camera - which The Sun, as you can see, credits online to another meerkat - can't actually be pictures of the moment a meerkat took the photos, can they?

I mean, you'd have to conclude that almost the entire range of British papers yesterday ran a story using fake, staged, or reconstructed photos of the event.

Who'd have thought the printed press could stoop to the low level of the nation's deceitful broadcasters?

Posted by Martin Belam, September 7, 2007
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