Doctored Boston Photo: Did The NY Daily News Make An Image From The Marathon Less Gory?

An editor for the Orange County Register, Charles Apple, has criticized the NY Daily News in its coverage of the Boston Marathon bombings for allegedly altering a photo of two injured women for use on its Tuesday front page. The photo, which was taken by John Tlumacki of the Boston Globe, depicts two injured women, with one lying supine in a pool of blood. In Tlumacki's image, the latter has a apparently severe open wound on one leg. The photo run by the NY Daily News shows no such wound, covering it with the black pants which the woman is wearing.

"Looks to me like somebody did a little doctoring of that photo to remove a bit of gore. If you can't stomach the gore, don't run the photo. Period," wrote Apple. He added that the same photo had been used by the Newark Star-Ledger on page one, but without apparent manipulation.

A spokesperson from the Daily News, Ken Frydman, issued a statement this morning saying, "The Daily News edited that photo out of sensitivity to the victims, the families and the survivors. There were far more gory photos that the paper chose not to run, and frankly I think the rest of the media should have been as sensitive as the Daily News."

The newspaper called the image "iconic" in a Tuesday headline. The other woman, who is sitting up and wears a look which could be of astonishment and fear, was revealed to be Nicole Gross, a personal trainer from Charlotte, N.C. The identity of the woman who is lying supine in the photo is not clarified in the Daily News article.

The photo reawakened controversy regarding what should and should not be depicted in the media following tragedies like the marathon bombings. Previously, an AP photo of three people wheeling 27-year-old Jeff Bauman, who lost much of its legs in the explosion, was the subject of similar debate when some news outlets ran the photo cropped from the knee down to conceal his wounds.

The Epoch Times reported that the allegation came after the New York Post was accused of inflating the death total to 12 people - as opposed to the actual figure of 3 - on Monday and Tuesday. The Post also erroneously reported that authorities had found a suspect, a 20-year-old Saudi national, who had been wounded in the attacks. The man was being interviewed from his hospital bed by the FBI but was not considered a suspect at the time.