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When it comes to publicity photos of news anchors, broadcast networks say they will airbrush a stray hair on a face or a piece of spinach from someone's teeth and maybe fiddle with lighting and contrast, but beyond that, they let a photo speak for itself.
Yet a shot of incoming Evening News anchor Katie Couric in CBS' publicity magazine Watch, in which the former NBC Today star's neck and waistline have been digitally altered to make her look about 20 pounds lighter, raises questions about whether the practice is as routine with news personalities as it is with entertainment stars and is a further blurring of the line between the once-separate entities.
The altered photo, which was taken at an advertiser presentation in the spring, appears in the 400,000-circulation magazine that is distributed on American Airlines flights and also available elsewhere.
It was doctored by an "overzealous" photo editor and was a mistake, says CBS spokesman and Watch editor in chief Gil Schwartz.
He says there are different standards for CBS Entertainment and CBS News publicity shots; photos in the news category must meet certain clarity standards and not be significantly altered, as this one was.
"This is not something that is going to happen again," Schwartz says. CBS distributed the original, undoctored photo to news organizations, and Schwartz says it is "unclear" why the photo in Watch was doctored. He says it was not a routine practice.
But Us magazine editor Janice Min is not surprised that the photo is one of a woman. "There always has been a serious double standard about how women in news are relentlessly commodified and objectified. Obviously, you don't see Rush Limbaugh losing 20 pounds in his photos."
Ken Tucker, editor at large of Entertainment Weekly, agrees. "This (photo) game gets played anytime a woman is put in a position of prominence. The talk about Katie is, 'Oh, she's so smart, and she's such a groundbreaker,' but the visual is, 'How can we make her look hot now that she's not showing her legs anymore'" as she did on Today.
Bob Steele, who teaches ethics at Florida's Poynter Institute, says that although it's acceptable to alter a photo of an actor in a fictional project, "people like Katie Couric are in the business of reporting the truth, and if we alter the truth about them, we raise suspicions of the public, which asks, 'What else are (the networks) changing?'"
Bob Zelnick, who teaches journalism at Boston University and used to report for ABC News, isn't concerned. "With all the live work Katie does, the truth will out."
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