Vegnews and the meat photos controversy
The recent revelation by the blogger Quarrygirl that the Vegetarian magazine, VegNews, has been using stock photography of meat-filled food and passing it off as vegan has caused what the tabloids would call something of a furore in the online vegan community.
On her blog, Quarrygirl has clearly shown that Vegnews has been using photography from iStock’s back catalogue for many of its photos (see http://www.quarrygirl.com/2011/04/13/rant-veg-news-is-putting-the-meat-into-vegan-issues).
Quarrygirl illustrates numerous examples of this on her blog. Including photoshopping out the bones from a rack of ribs and using a picture of a beefburger.
This story has been doing the rounds for the past couple of days and even though Vegnews has effectively been found out with its trousers around its ankles, it didn’t go on a public relations blitz but instead issued a half-hearted response where it cited financial imperatives rather than actually apologising (http://vegnews.com/web/uploads/asset/3169/file/FromVegNews.pdf). Not surprisingly, this didn’t satiate the angry vegans on the web and just seemed to make the situation worse.
In addition, it will be very difficult for VegNews to regain the trust of its readership. Not only will customers aware of this controversy now always have the nagging doubt not only that its photos are not of vegan food but more importantly, if the publication was prepared to have pretty unethical journalistic practices such as this (aside from it being unethical from a vegan perspective), the concern will be that it would have been prepared to decieve its audience elsewhere too.
The internet not only makes it very difficult to dupe the public but it also allows stories to break from non-mainstream sources and then spread quickly. It also raises questions for organisations as to the best way to cope with public relations issues. VegNews should probably have sought advice from a PR professional before publishing it’s ill-advised response, which has probably made the situation worse.
With this story starting to spread out from blogs and social media, it’s probably a matter of time before the mainstream press pick it up (the media loves it when people or companies fall from grace and get found out). In the meantime, VegNews will almost certainly start losing subscribers and for a small independent publisher this could be very dangerous indeed.