Brooklyn newspaper removes women from famous Obama photo

An ultra-conservative Jewish newspaper, Der Zeitung, refuses to acknowledge women in power to such a degree that it has edited two women — one being Hillary Clinton — out of that famous photo of President Obama watching the raid against Osama Bin Laden. The newspaper, which is written in Hebrew, has a primary readership that is Hasidic, an ultra-orthodox branch of Judaism. While it is certainly within their right to edit photos — and to not acknowledge powerful women — it is still a heinous ethical violation. Take a look for yourself at the edited photo and then the original, which can be downloaded in high resolution from the White House's Flickr site here:

And just to clarify the West Valley View's position on edited photos: we don't do it. It's a breach of our ethical values to alter a photo in a way that no longer represents what actually happened. That means adding elements, removing elements or any other digital trickery. The news speaks for itself and requires no manipulation from us.

There are times the View does alter photos for the purposes of illustrating a feature. For example, last year we ran a Photoshop'd photo of a student inside a high school locker for a series a reporter did on homeless students. To inform the readers and to generally keep our photo editing transparent to the public, any such photos are labeled in the cutline — or caption — as "photo illustration." These illustrations, which are common at newspapers, are never breaking news and are usually surreal in nature. For instance, with the locker photo, it was quite obvious that the student couldn't fit in the locker in reality; it was meant to figuratively illustrate how the students were living off the assistance provided by the schools.