Fox News Doctored Photos: Here's Mine

Some of you saw and heard me discuss yesterday the fact that Fox News was caught doctoring the photos of its guests to make them look worse to the American public.

One of our bloggers found that picture of me that I was referring to, the one that had my friends wondering when my head grew out of shape. I thought I would put it next to another picture of me so you can see the difference. What they did to the New York Times reporters was even worse.



Notice the longer forehead on the first pic (and mine), darkened eyes, yellowed teeth (second pic), and widened ears on the second picture. Again, what they did to me was not as bad as what they did to the Times reporters, but it still has a dramatic impact on how the public perceives you. It's easier to believe someone is a deranged villain if their facial features seem out of whack and not socially acceptable (much of this reaction is subconscious).
During O'Reilly's five day tirades toward me (this spring and last fall), my image was matched with other images of me as an "angry black man", which caused many Syracuse alumni to assume that I was a black terrorist or something before they'd even had a chance to hear me speak or read any of my articles.

While these actions are problematic and patently unfair, the truth is that this is what we can expect from Fox News.

Fox News Doctors Photos: Now I know Why I Looked So Bad

by Dr. Boyce Watkins
www.BoyceWatkins.net


Here is a before/after picture of what Fox News did to one of the people it that it attempted to villify on its network. Notice that the first image looks normal, and the second one looks like the guy should be starring in a horror film.

I know this first hand, since that is what I speculated Fox did to me. Last month, when Bill O'Reilly spent 5 days calling for me to be fired from Syracuse University (fortunately, Olbermann and others around the country backed me up and called Bill out for the liar he is), he consistently ran a picture of me that made me look like I was out of "Killer Negroes r Us". If Willy Horton and Flava Flav had a baby together, that would have been my picture.

I didn't think much of it, since I just thought that maybe I was actually that ugly. But many of my friends called and asked "Why do you look so crazy in that picture?" I couldn't tell them why. Even I never thought that Fox News would sink so low as to possibly photoshop a picture to make the villain look even more villainous than before.

Now we have evidence.

Working behind the scenes with Fox, I can tell you that they are, in my opinion, one of the dirtiest networks in the country. When I was booked for back-to-back appearance with Hannity & Colmes and Keith Olbermann, the producer from MSNBC asked me not to tell the Fox producer that they were booking me in the same studio. She said that there are times when the Fox producers will deliberately book the hour they don't need just to make sure that I cannot get onto Olbermann's show. Whether this is true or not, I'm not sure. But based on the other silly things Fox does, I wouldn't doubt it.

Perhaps rather than calling them Fox News, we should call them "Dirty Dog News" or "Fux News", or perhaps we should just call them "Old News", because their journalistic credibility is gone. Perhaps Juan Williams is working for the right network after all.