'Valkyrie' Flap Proves Media Only Tries To Hurt
And to think they gave me all that traffic...
Photo: Associated Press and United Artists
Back on June 17 I noticed my article headlined "First Look at Tom Cruise in 'Valkyrie'" suddenly shot to the top of my most read article tracker and I was baffled as to why all of a sudden it was getting so much play. As it turned out, after I ran my little custom behind-the-scenes super-secret stat tracker the source of the link was none other than Slate.com, a site I respect dearly and thought it was pretty cool Kim Masters (of whom I also respect) shot me a link.
However, their article titled "Tom Cruise Mystery: The case of the doctored publicity photo" I was not so impressed with.
The article tried to say that United Artists had Photoshopped an image of Claus von Stauffenberg of whom Tom Cruise portrays in the upcoming Valkyrie to make the German officer look more like Cruise in the comparison you see above.
They went to the extent to do a whole bunch of manipulation themselves and bring in some of their "experts" to prove the photo had been altered.
I thought this was interesting so I set out on a mission to do the same thing to see if they were in fact correct. Unfortunately, after I found an AP image that looked exactly like the one United Artists used, only not so dark, I found the two to be identical. So, I didn't run the story… Good thing too, because it has now been proven wrong and Slate has had to issue a correction:
This piece raised questions about a photograph of Claus von Stauffenberg that appeared in a United Artists promotional campaign for the movie Valkyrie. The piece pointed out that the photo UA used looked more like Tom Cruise, the star of the film, than a similar-looking AP photo of von Stauffenberg. Because of insufficient photo research by Slate's editors, we failed to discover another archival image of von Stauffenberg, which appears to be the one UA used in its publicity campaign. As a result of this mistake, the question the piece raised—whether the photo had been doctored in an effort to make Claus von Stauffenberg look more like Tom Cruise—was unwarranted.
What they should have done is issued an apology saying that in their zeal to join the Valkyrie hating bandwagon they got ahead of themselves and stirred up some shit where there wasn't anything to stir. This is an article that got picked up by more than one source and I highly doubt those sources will be quick to correct the error as well.
I will admit, all the release date moves and reshoots this film has seen do not bode well for the film's quality, but to make things up is just bad reporting and I was shocked when it was Masters's name attached to the article. I had more than one person mention to me how UA had cheated the image and I had to correct them and say I tried it myself and came to the conclusion Slate was wrong.
It's nice to see the correction and also nice to see that Yahoo also picked up the story correction, but it just goes to show that when digging dirt you better have a good shovel.
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