It is a little thing. But even little things can be off-putting.
CNN this week aired an altered family photo of Democratic nominee Joe Biden and his son, Hunter. The original picture shows Hunter wearing a cap bearing the logo of the football team then known as the Washington Redskins. But the photo that appeared Monday on CNN shows no sign of the football team’s Native American-based logo.
The Biden campaign is responsible for the edits. It maintains it airbrushed the photo for copyright purposes.
“We removed the image because it is copyrighted, as is a very common practice on campaigns,” an aide said Wednesday.
A spokesperson for CNN confirmed that, going forward, the cable network will show only the unedited version of the picture.
“As with any biographical documentary, we ask the subject for photos and videos,” the spokesperson told the Washington Examiner. “We received this picture and many others from the Biden campaign … Future airings will include the original photo.”
What is strange is that the untouched version of the picture appeared on CNN on Aug. 21 during the fourth night of the Democratic National Convention. The photo, which was included in a video produced by the DNC, looked like this:
Biden’s official Facebook account also shared the unedited version of the picture on June 21.
Then, on Monday, during an hour-long, CNN-produced documentary about the former vice president, the same photo appeared — but with a significant alteration:
Though it is a little thing, it is still an act of disappearing history. That an alternate version of history, no matter how insignificant, can worm its way onto a major news network is cause for concern.
The altered Biden photo is not as serious as, say, ABC News airing footage from a gun range in Kentucky and claiming it showed a White House-enabled war crime in Syria. And it is not as deliberate as Fox News publishing digitally manipulated photos of Seattle’s so-called Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone.
But it is concerning nonetheless that scrubbed history can appear with such apparent ease on a major news network.
