ABSTRACT
A photo on the front page of New York Newsday on Feb. 16, 1994, showed two well-known Olympic ice skaters, Tonya Harding and Nancy Kerrigan, practicing together. New York Newsday's editors had fiddled with photos featuring two of the most talked-about individuals of the day, and they weren't joking. The results of their efforts were clearly visible on newsstands all over Manhattan. Defenders of journalism's accuracy and reliability quickly grabbed their lances and mounted their steeds: "A composite photograph is not the truth," Stephen D. Isaacs, then acting dean of the Columbia Graduate School of Journalism, thundered. To understand the significance of New York Newsday's digital manipulation of this photograph, it is first necessary to acknowledge all the other ways photographs are manipulated. The language of photojournalism will grow and that is good news for those who struggle to report with images.
