Fox News reportedly spliced together a photo of an armed man with separate photos of broken shop windows and road barriers to create two misleading images for a report on Seattle’s police-free protest area, called the Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone. The Seattle Times reports Fox had no disclaimers indicating the pictures—taken more than a week apart—had been altered. The network removed them when questions were raised but reportedly replaced them with an image taken before the zone was established.
Fox also removed a photo of a burning city it had put above stories about Seattle; the picture actually showed an earlier protest in Minnesota. President Trump has been in a tizzy about the autonomous zone, claiming anarchists are now in control of the city, while Seattle officials note the zone has been mainly peaceful.
In a statement, Fox News said an editor’s note had been added to three stories saying that a “photo collage” did not clearly delineate between photos of the CHAZ and scenes of “wreckage from recent riots”. The note also admitted that a slideshow of Seattle “mistakenly included a picture from Minneapolis. Fox News regrets these errors.”
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