A 2015 photo of The Greenville News used online to falsely accuse attendees of Congressman John Lewis’ recent funeral of not wearing masks.
The photo was shared online with words that wrongly said it showed the June 30 funeral and with words on the most sensitive symbol that come with a spelling error: “There is no mask on the site.”
The symbol is from the September 2015 funeral of The Reverend Jessie Jackson’s mother Helen Burns Jackson.
Photographer Heidi Heilbrunn Needlemann told Greenville News that she remembered the image. It is one of dozens of published photographs of the funeral at Springfield Baptist Church.
Heilbrunn Needleman, a staff photographer from 2006 to 2016 and now an independent photographer, said she was unaware that her photo had been misused until she contacted her.
“As a photojournalist, I’ve taken my homework seriously,” he says. “It’s terrible when other people borrow pictures and especially when they use those photographs to lie and uninform the public.”
The symbol is as it should be written on The Greenville News’s online page and is still available here. While he publishes Heilbrunn Needleman, a funeral show with the face of Helen Burns Jackson can be seen near Reverend Jackson, who sits next to former President Bill Clinton.
The misleading symbol has already been removed by verifying the facts on the Snopes and Politifact websites. The Greenville News makes a percentage of the misleading photo editing, which can be reviewed with the addition of the “mis-titled” overlaid word on the Snopes website.
It is not known who published the meme or to what extent it was transmitted before it was widely demystified.
Steve Bruss, editor-in-chief of The Greenville News, said the misleading symbol shows the importance of getting news from reliable sources.
He said professional photojournalists as they should be capture and caption photographs and that unlicensed use of photographs can distort the truth.
In case of doubt, the search team for opposite symbols such as Tin Eye or Google Reverse Image Search can locate the origin of the symbols.