Original article (in Serbian) was published on 09/05/2022
Texts equipped with outdated photos of empty market shelves in the EU and the USA, which appeared in the domestic media in March this year, got their successors in the first week of May and expanded to new media. Last week, Informer, Alo, Srpski Telegraf (Serbian Telegraph), and also Politika published articles in their print editions that deal with the problem of rising food and energy prices in Europe and the United States, along with archival photographs of empty shelves.
Just like in the texts that FN Tragac dealt with in March (1, 2), the new wave of manipulatively illustrated articles does not in any way indicate that the photographs of empty shelves are only illustrations and not pictures of the real situation in stores across the EU and the United States.
A new expansion of such articles in May began with the text of the Serbian Telegraph entitled “Americans are fighting for food” and the subtitle “there is nothing in Serbia”. The text of the Serbian Telegraph is equipped with a photo from the supermarket with the description “empty shelves in America are no longer a rarity”. However, the same photo was already used by the domestic media, including the website of the Serbian Telegraph Republika, in March 2020, to illustrate the food shortages in London at the beginning of the pandemic.
The text of the Serbian Telegraph contains some accurate information, such as that UN data show that world food prices are at the highest level in the last 60 years, and that inflation in the United States in March this year was 8.5%, which is the highest percentage in the last 40 years.
A ten-euro bread
Another graphic solution of the Serbian Telegraph could have misled the readers of this tabloid. It states that “in Germany, the price of bread is 10 euros”. For readers who are more careful, it is stated that it is a “warning from Berlin” that the price of bread “may soon go up to 10 euros”, but a much more striking graphic solution suggests that this is the current price of bread.
It is actually a warning given by Klaus-Peter Lucht, vice-president of one of the farmers’ associations in Germany, in an interview with the German tabloid Bild. The current price of bread in Germany is less than five euros, which can be concluded based on media data, sites that deal with housing prices around the world (1, 2, 3) and catalogs of German bakeries that sell their products online (1, 2, 3). Also, data from the website Statista show that the price of bread in Germany has increased by 15% since 2015.
Proof from 2020
The following day, similar texts appeared in Informer and Alo. Informer writes that “stores in Austria are getting empty”, with the title “Shortages of oil, butter, flour” attached to a photo of a supermarket worker moving items from an almost completely empty shelf. However, this photo does not show the shortages in Austria. It was taken in March 2020 in the Edeka Siegel supermarket in a neighborhood not far from Stuttgart in Germany.
On the same day, Alo wrote about the same topic in its print edition, stating that “there is no sunflower oil, butter, flour in Vienna”. Furthermore, a photo of conspicuously empty supermarket shelves was published, with no indication that it is an illustration, nor is the source cited.
The mentioned photo comes from the online photo depository Shutterstock, where it was published in March 2020, featuring a description of panic shopping in Europe due to the coronavirus pandemic. Its author is anonymous, but in the description of his profile he states that he comes from Switzerland. His photograph, which Alo used inappropriately, was published in March 2020 as an illustration in a publication about the coronavirus and its impact on the food distribution chain.
Empty shelves are blurred
Probably the strangest example of the described manipulations using outdated photographs appeared a few days ago in the printed edition of Politika. Above the text entitled “Berliners fear growing crisis”, Politika published a photo showing a full consumer cart in a supermarket whose shelves are not empty, but blurred in the photo processing program. Below the photo, Politika does not indicate that it is an illustration, as, for example, was done by the Al Jazeera’s website using the same photo, but adds a description of the following content: “Empty shelves in a German supermarket”.
Apart from the fact that it is clear to any reader with good vision that the shelves in that photo are not empty but blurred, the photo which Politika used to describe the “growing crisis” in Germany is over ten years old and cannot illustrate the current situation. It was published on the website of the German Spiegel at the end of January 2011 in a text that dealt with the warning about inflation, which then reached 2% in Germany, which is acceptable for today’s conditions.