John Moore said he knew he was taking "an important image" when he captured a little girl in tears but that he "could never have expected that it would have had this level of impact." The image shows a 2-year-old Honduran girl crying while her mother is searched and detained, and has become a visual centerpiece in the heated debate over U.S. policy on immigration and family separations. And this week, it was used to create the cover for the July 2 issue of TIME. Moore said he captured the photograph while on an official ride-along with U.S. Border Patrol and that he was "overcome with sadness" when he took it. On TIME magazine's cover, the portion of the picture showing the little girl is isolated to create an illustration. She is seen looking up to President Trump, who is looking down in her direction. The cover features three words of text: "Welcome to America." How does the photographer feel about the use of his image by TIME? Moore said he is glad the picture is bringing attention to the story "whether it's in TIME or any other publication." John Moore/Getty Images Moore, who is a Getty Images special correspondent and senior staff reporter and was interviewed by TIME, did note the importance of the preserving the integrity of the original photo. "Any photojournalist would prefer that a still photo remain as a documentary photo and not part of an illustration. However, I understand their need to try and broaden the story. And so on one hand, I always prefer a photograph to be used with its normal integrity. But on the other, I don't take great exception to them doing an illustration," he said. The cover of the July 2, 2018, issue of TIME. TIME Moore also said he is "pleased that this image has touched so many people's hearts." "I've worked in this business for many years and oftentimes we cover stories that we think are really important but in the end they may not resonate with the public," said Moore. "This image seems to have touched people profoundly and in fact it's a very emotional photograph for me as well." "For ten years covering immigration issues I've tried to humanize a story which is sometimes conveyed by some in the media in very statistical terms, and making photographs, or taking photographs, that make people feel is one way to humanize this issue," he said. "And I think if everyone involved in this debate sees each other as human beings worthy of respect, ultimately we can find humane solutions."<doc-sep>TIME ‘Crying Girl’ Cover’s Truthiness The crying Honduran girl who has become a symbol of a brutal policy actually is not one of its victims. James Joyner · · 27 comments A lot of Republicans in my social media feeds, particularly on Facebook, are chortling over a rather epic blooper on the above TIME cover. WaPo (“Time magazine’s major mistake on the crying-girl cover“): There are examples of children separated from parents who immigrated illegally playing out nationwide. And well-meaning people across the political spectrum have taken a stand and forced change. Unfortunately, they made their most iconic image something that wasn’t a family being separated — and ultimately undermines their cause. The photo of a nearly 2-year-old Honduran girl crying as her mother is being patted down quickly went viral. It has also been used for a Facebook fundraiser to raise more than $18 million to help reunite families who have been separated. And the whole thing culminated in its placement in a photo illustration on the cover of Time magazine. The image features the girl against a red background, with President Trump towering over her and the words “Welcome to America.” The implication was clear: This was a girl who, like 2,500 other children, was being separated from her mother. Time and many others made a decision to suggest that this was an example of Trump uprooting our American ideals. But that’s not what it was. As The Washington Post’s Samantha Schmidt and Kristine Phillips report, the girl’s father says the child and her mother were never separated. U.S. Customs and Border Protection confirmed it, as did the Honduran deputy foreign minister. That’s rather embarrassing. It’s one thing for thousands of people to retweet a photo without checking to be sure that it’s legit. [Or, as it turns down, a blogger doing this in his spare time; we used the photo here at OTB to illustrate a post on the topic.] But you’d expect better of a major news magazine. But, shockingly, TIME’s initial stance was to double down: Time is standing by its cover. Editor-in-chief Edward Felsenthal says in a statement: “The June 12 photograph of the 2-year-old Honduran girl became the most visible symbol of the ongoing immigration debate in America for a reason: Under the policy enforced by the administration, prior to its reversal this week, those who crossed the border illegally were criminally prosecuted, which in turn resulted in the separation of children and parents. Our cover and our reporting capture the stakes of this moment.” No, goddammit, it doesn’t. It captures something else entirely. The image is a sad one, but it is of a rather standard occurrence at the border: A mother and her daughter attempted to immigrate illegally and were apprehended. The mother, in fact, had tried this before and was deported in 2013. The photo says virtually nothing about Trump’s now-aborted policy. In fact, it’s an example of how not all young children were separated from their parents. As Aaron Blake, who wrote the above-linked WaPo report, observes, Opponents of Trump’s policy will decry all of this fact-checking of the photo as hand-wringing. They’ll point to Trump’s and Sarah Huckabee Sanders’s tweets and say all of this is a meaningless distraction from an awful policy. The tragic scenes still exist — probably some of which look a lot like one in that viral photo — and we still have very little idea how or when these thousands of children are going to be reunited with their parents after Trump’s executive order reversing the policy. […] But forcing action on this policy requires care and credibility. It requires convincing skeptics that you’re not overselling the problem by using misleading information and images. The use of this photo damaged that entire effort — no matter how pristine the motives were. Quite right. Granting that Trump ultimately reversed the policy, people on my Facebook feed now think the entire story is “fake news” because of this one blooper. Eventually, TIME issued a rather tepid correction: “The original version of this story misstated what happened to the girl in the photo after she [was] taken from the scene,” said the correction, which was added to the article shortly after it was published online on Tuesday. “The girl was not carried away screaming by U.S. Border Patrol agents; her mother picked her up and the two were taken away together.” The photographer, John Moore of Getty Images, had noticed the mistake and contacted Time to make the correction, the magazine said. But millions of people saw the cover; dozens will see the correction. In the October 2005 pilot episode of Comedy Central’s “Colbert Report,” Stephen Colbert coined the term truthiness to describe “the belief or assertion that a particular statement is true based on the intuition or perceptions of some individual or individuals, without regard to evidence, logic, intellectual examination, or facts.” While originally satirizing the way conservative news outlets present information, a 2012 study of the phenomenon found that it was real: In four different experiments they discovered that people believe claims are true, regardless of whether they actually are true, when a decorative photograph appears alongside the claim. The work is published online in the Springer journal, Psychonomic Bulletin & Review. “We wanted to examine how the kinds of photos people see every day—the ones that decorate newspaper or TV headlines, for example—might produce “truthiness,” said lead investigator Eryn J. Newman of Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. “We were really surprised by what we found.” In a series of four experiments in both New Zealand and Canada, Newman and colleagues showed people a series of claims such as, “The liquid metal inside a thermometer is magnesium” and asked them to agree or disagree that each claim was true. In some cases, the claim appeared with a decorative photograph that didn’t reveal if the claim was actually true—such as a thermometer. Other claims appeared alone. When a decorative photograph appeared with the claim, people were more likely to agree that the claim was true, regardless of whether it was actually true. Across all the experiments, the findings fit with the idea that photos might help people conjure up images and ideas about the claim more easily than if the claim appeared by itself. “We know that when it’s easy for people to bring information to mind, it ‘feels’ right,” said Newman. The research has important implications for situations in which people encounter decorative photos, such as in the media or in education. “Decorative photos grab people’s attention,” Newman said. “Our research suggests that these photos might have unintended consequences, leading people to accept information because of their feelings rather than the facts.” Of course, truthiness works both ways. In Colbert’s original premise, it was about people believing things because they feel them to be true, facts be damned. The idea that some massive number of dangerous criminals are flooding our streets by posing as refugees is an example of that. Here, though, we have the opposite phenomenon: We have a fact that’s been proven untrue used as an example of a situation that was. That this particular girl was not actually a refugee child separated from her mother by scary US government agents doesn’t negate the fact that some 2500 others were. Alas, however, TIME’s printing of news too good to check will make many believe that the whole thing was a cocked-up story by the liberal media.<doc-sep>TIME’s new cover: A reckoning after Trump's border separation policy: What kind of country are we? https://t.co/U4Uf8bffoR pic.twitter.com/sBCMdHuPGc — TIME (@TIME) June 21, 2018 The image of a crying toddler that has become a symbol of immigrant families was used in TIME Magazine's new cover, which is edited to show President Donald Trump looming over the girl.The cover says simply, "Welcome to America. "In the cover story, TIME examines the president's rhetoric and the ideals associated with it. "For the first 240 years of U.S. history, at least, our most revered chief executives reliably articulated a set of high-minded, humanist values that bound together a diverse nation by naming what we aspired to: democracy, humanity, equality," TIME's Karl Vick wrote in the cover story that goes along with the photo. "With each passing month he (Trump) is testing anew just how far from our founding humanism his "America first" policies can take us. And over the past two months on our southern border, we have seen the result," he wrote.The photo of the little girl was taken by John Moore, a Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer for Getty Images. He took it during a ride-along with a Customs and Border Patrol agent on June 12. The girl was among a group of women and children gathered on a dirt road that the agents stopped near McAllen, Texas.An agent asked the mother to put the child down, and the little girl immediately started crying. That's when Moore snapped the now-famous photo.TIME's editors said they chose the image because it was so powerful. "This one was tough for me. As soon as it was over, they were put into a van. I had to stop and take deep breaths," Moore told TIME . "All I wanted to do was pick her up. But I couldn't. "Moore said he was able to speak to the mother briefly and learned that the little girl was a 2-year-old from Honduras.Moore, who as a photojournalist has been covering the U.S.-Mexico border for a decade, said he did not see the pair separated but that policy at the time would indicate their separation. "All that happens behind closed doors... We'll never see that," he told ABC News On Wednesday President Trump signed an executive order that he said would end the separation of children from their parents when families cross illegally. "Trump may have backed down on the specific practice of family separation, but the larger question remains," Vick wrote in the cover story. "In the balance between the integrity of the U.S. border with Mexico and a parent's love for a child, where will we come down?"<doc-sep>
The top editor at Time, Edward Felsenthal, on Sunday defended the magazine's controversial cover about the situation at the US-Mexico border. The cover included a now iconic image of a crying child set against a red background, with President Donald Trump looking down at her. Some ---- particularly pro-Trump news outlets ---- have accused the magazine and the mainstream media of misusing the image of the little girl to tell a story about migrant children being separated from their parents and the US and Mexico border. CNN reported Monday that the government said the girl in the photograph was never separated from her mother. The girl's father confirmed to The New York Times on Friday the pair were never separated. But Felsenthal stood by Time's use of the image. He told CNN's Brian Stelter on "Reliable Sources" that the image "symbolized this moment in America." The photograph is of a Honduran toddler in tears, looking up as police detained her mother. It was widely shared by media outlets last week, including CNN, during a wave of backlash against the Trump administration's treatment of undocumented immigrants. It circulated as the separation of children from their parents at the border became a hot-button issue. Related: What the iconic crying girl photo says about press access Time issued a correction to one online story that initially described the image as depicting family separation. (CNN quickly issued a correction on one article Thursday about the Time cover to correctly describe the image of the crying girl.) Felsenthal defended the use of the image on Time's cover last week. "We chose the photo because this little girl became the face of this story on front pages and home pages and TV screens and Facebook feeds," he said. But a barrage of pro-Trump media outlets have pounced on Time and other publications, saying they misrepresented the girl. The Daily Caller wrote: "The media's narrative about family separation at the border has been completely demolished, as the truth behind a viral photo of a crying Honduran child tells a completely different story." Stelter, the host of "Reliable," said the conservative outlets are "using this one issue to try to distract from what is a disgusting situation at the border." The US Department of Homeland security said earlier this month that about 2,000 children had been separated from their parents at the border between April 19 and May 31 of this year. The separations were caused largely by the Trump administration's decision to charge every adult caught illegally crossing the border with a federal crime. Related: Magazine stands by illustration of crying girl next to Trump Stelter suggested to Felsenthal that perhaps the image of the Honduran girl "shouldn't have been the face of this story if she wasn't separated from her mom." Felsenthal replied: "None of us in the media who used the photo knew what had happened to the girl after this precise moment. And I actually think part of the power of the image is that unknown." Felsenthal earlier defended the cover in a statement issued Friday. "The June 12 photograph of the 2-year-old Honduran girl became the most visible symbol of the ongoing immigration debate in America for a reason ... Our cover and our reporting capture the stakes of this moment," he said. —CNN's Tal Kopan contributed to this report.