Apple hit a $1 trillion market cap and CEO Tim Cook is all smiles? Maybe, but this photo has nothing to do with it

Apple hit a $1 trillion market cap and CEO Tim Cook is all smiles? Maybe, but this photo has nothing to do with it

CNBC illustrates their story about Apple Computer achieving a market capitalization of $1 Trillion with this photo – Tim Cook must be happy about achieving $1 Trillion market cap, right?

The photo, however, is from at least December 2017, is probably from the Fifth Ave Apple Store opening in September 2017, and has nothing to do with today’s achievement. CNBC never mentions that this photo is unrelated to today or the news story.

Later, CNBC swapped out that photo and replaced it with this Getty Images photo of excited Apple Store staff – except its actually from September 22, 2017 – nearly a year ago and has nothing to do with the story.

In effect, this is a propaganda photo intended to convey a feeling of jubilation. Sadly, news services do this all the time. Good journalists will attach a note giving the source of the photo, when from a different event, but many, as we have documented on this blog, do not.

Substituting a photo of a different event is a classic technique used by propagandists. When this is done by social media propagandists, we’ve called it out. See here, here, here and here. There are more examples on this blog.

Substituting photos of different events and passing them off as a photo of a contemporary event is fictional news. CNBC blunders like this a lot (more on that here).They do not care about accuracy. At all.

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