A Reminder to Media Outlets to Value Your Photo Editors, Courtesy of Jar Jar Binks

With massive layoffs hitting photographers, photo editors, and other visual media-based professions across the industry over the last few years, it’s not surprising that we’ve seen a recent uptick in glaring front-page mistakes.

Remember that newspaper that used the male symbol on their women’s march cover?

Or how about that time CNN used some Fallout screengrabs to illustrate the terrors of Russian hacking?

Via Reddit.

Now we have a new major embarrassment to cringe at.

Via Drudge Report.

That there is the homepage of the Drudge Report, the conservative news aggregation site, as it remained throughout the entire Thursday workday. That’s the lede image for a story about Iranian missiles. But something looks off, doesn’t it?

Not only is that a Photoshopped image of missiles—the original picture of four missiles was published by multiple outlets in 2008 before it was pointed out that the image was doctored—it’s a Photoshop of a Photoshop. Because in addition to those original four doctored missiles having been cut and pasted all over themselves, if you look closely, you’ll see the worst Where’s Waldo? hiding in their trails.

Weesa don’t think @DRUDGE bothered to check the featured image on their front page. pic.twitter.com/82x2lQ83Si

— Mike Silangil (@msilangil91) February 2, 2017

In an era when the free press is becoming a thing of lore–both because of budget cuts and a Presidential attack on the entire industry–the effects of these cut corners (or just lack of interest) are becoming increasingly glaring. It’s a good lesson though. You start firing your photo and layout editors and before you know it, you’ve got one of the most hated characters in film history peering out at you from your home page.

Stories like these would be funny if they weren’t quite so depressing. (Okay, fine, some of them are still pretty funny. I suppose things can be both.)

(via The Verge, image via LucasFilms)

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