INDIA: Front page photo of the tsunami turns out to be a sham

By Vaikom Madhu
AsiaMedia Contributing Writer

Photos showing tsunami as it happened--published by major dailies, including the Times of India and Calgary Herald--turn out to be from 2002 China tidal wave

Monday, January 10, 2005

 

Kottayam, Kerala --- The tsunami of December 26 took a heavy toll on two continents. But the newest-edition tsunami is man-made: From Australia to North America, a tsunami of information swept away newspapers and television news, shattering their credibility.

 

An unidentified source is said to have provided the Bangalore office of the Press Trust of India (PTI), a semi-government-run news agency, with a set of photographs purported to be of tsunami waves hitting the beaches of Sri Lanka and Thailand. PTI put the photos on the net and they were promptly run by several television channels and newspapers, including the Times of India, the Calgary Herald in Canada and Tz, a German paper, who ran the image under the caption, “Tsunami in Sri Lanka.” Channel Nine’s Sky News, Australia also grabbed the images.

 

The images, as it turned out, were actually of a tidal wave hitting the banks of the Qiantangjiang River in China in 2002. The Times of India carried one of these photos on page one, January 1-- scores of youngsters were shown running for their life with gigantic waves chasing close on their heels. It was captioned, “A Tsunami lashes a holiday resort in Thailand on Dec 26. This picture was among a set of photographs sent to PTI’s Bangalore Office by an unknown source. More photos on P-9”.

 

The source of the photos was dubious for all media outlets who published them. The Calgary Herald carried an article about their source, World Job and Food Bank CEO Joseph Edison, on December 31, following an apology that read: “The media were incorrectly told this photo, along with others provided by the Calgary-based World Job and Food Bank, was from the recent tsunami disaster in south Asia. Several media outlets, including the Calgary Herald, Global news and CFCN TV used the photos.”

 

The Times of India ran a similar article about their source, PTI. On January 8: “Many Indian newspapers, including TOI, were caught unaware as it came to light that the purportedly real-time photographs of the tsunami - released on Thursday by PTI - were actually photographs of a tidal bore on the Qiantangjiang River in China in 2002. How the photographs got to the agency isn't clear yet. When contacted, PTI said that a correspondent from Bangalore filed the photographs, and they were trying to confirm that the photographs were indeed a hoax.”

 

The Hindu and leading Malayalam dailies, including Malayala Manorama and Mathrubhumi, did not run the photos. Malayalam papers depend more often on photos from their own staff, AFP, AP or Reuters.

 

As the media scales down their disaster coverage, in favor of stories about relief and reconstruction, photos of the disaster are still surfacing. The Mathrumbhi Daily published a December 26 image of the waves hitting South Indian, taken from the roof of a building in the coastal Quilon District of Kerala.

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See the photos that mistakenly made front pages on Snopes.com.

Date Posted: 1/10/2005