National Geographic’s Mea Culpa
Travel Blog • Jim Benning • 09.24.04 | 11:15 PM ET
Dan Rather and CBS News aren’t the only media heavyweights apologizing for shoddy journalism these days. In the October issue of National Geographic, Editor-in-Chief Bill Allen apologizes to readers for unwittingly passing off a staged photograph of a tribal elephant hunt in Tanzania as the real thing. According to Allen, the photographer, Gilles Nicolet, posed the photo, which appeared in the July issue, and then lied to editors about it. Readers noticed that elephant tusks in the photo had numbers printed on them. When confronted, Nicolet confessed that the tusks had been borrowed from the Tanzania Department of Wildlife. “I’m still losing sleep over the fact that we failed to uncover the truth before publishing the pictures,” Allen writes in the print edition; (a different explanation is available here). “You have our apology.”
Email to friend
Twitter
del.icio.us
Digg
Facebook
Furl
Ma.gnolia
Mixx
Reddit
StumbleUpon
Yahoo! Buzz
Jim Benning is the editor and co-founder of World Hum.
