Legal journalist Mark Joseph Stern noticed that Fox News added a man carrying a military-assault rifle into images of Seattle’s Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone (CHAZ) on Friday. The CHAZ is a police-free area currently occupied by protesters police violence.
Fox News featured the images on their website without any mention that they had been altered. They placed the exact same gunman in two different photos. In one, the gunman’s left arm had been weirdly cut off in a straight line from the shoulder to the elbow.
Fox claimed that the image of a shattered window in the CHAZ was taken this week, but it seems it was actually taken on May 30.
“Given how vigorously Fox News personalities have argued that men toting assault weapons in public are not inherently threatening,” Stern wrote, “it’s curious the outlet digitally inserted a man toting a gun to make the autonomous zone seem more threatening and scary.”
Fox News eventually issued the following editor’s note:
A FoxNews.com home page photo collage which originally accompanied this story included multiple scenes from Seattle’s ‘Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone’ and of wreckage following recent riots. The collage did not clearly delineate between these images, and has since been replaced. In addition, a recent slideshow depicting scenes from Seattle mistakenly included a picture from St. Paul, Minnesota. Fox News regrets these errors.
Here are some reactions to the news of Fox’s photoshopping from Twitter: