braiker

January 24, 2013

This is a picture that ran in today’s New York Post.

The little girl on the right is my daughter. The girl on the left is her best friend. The article this photo is illustrating is titled Parents Are Left Out In the Cold During the Bus Strike.

The caption of the photo:

COLD SCHOOL: Bundled-up youngsters who attend PS 10 in Park Slope, Brooklyn, are joined by their parents yesterday for the icy trek to school.

EVERY SINGLE THING about this is inaccurate. My kid and her friend were with our sitter (we do a nanny share, it’s great), who picks them up after school — neither of them were with their parents. I walk her to school every morning because it is two blocks from our house. We do not rely on buses. We are completely and utterly and thoroughly unaffected by the bus strike.

Now. This is pretty harmless and innocuous but speaks volumes about how the NY Post conducts its business. Our sitter (and other parents who were there) were told that the photographer was taking “cold weather pictures,” which I guess in a sense is true. But my kid was used to illustrate a story in a way that is completely false and/or misleading.

I am honestly not worked up about this, but it does speak to how a newspaper manipulates facts on small levels every day just to make the point it feels like making. I don’t think the Times would have done this, but I could be wrong. It also makes one wonder what other liberties the Post, in my opinion a malicious and shady paper to begin with, takes with large and important stories every day.

OK, I’m not being totally fair — not everything was inaccurate. They got the name of her school right.

9:49am | URL: http://tmblr.co/Z7MGbycXG-9N
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