Sunday 18 March 2012

Mirror uses model's image to illustrate serial killer story

Yesterday - the day before Mother's Day - the Daily Mirror came with a free 'Women Who Kill' pull-out. A 'Mirror special on women with no mercy'. It was trailed on the front page:


But which 'female with no mercy' is that in the bottom row, to the right of Myra Hindley? (apologies for image quality)


In the actual pull-out, she appears on the centre pages, under the headline:

35 male bodies all in labelled coffins in her wine cellar, and in the 12th, her son

The photo on the front page is used again inside (image from Patricia Belda Martinez):


The text is about Vera Renczi. But the woman in the picture is not Renczi, or indeed any other murderer.

Instead, it's a model called Morgana, who tweeted:

As Aaron Jacob Jones points out, the image used by the Mirror has had Morgana's copyright cropped off the bottom.

If you search Google Images for 'Vera Renczi' the first result you get is from the Killers Without Conscience website, which used Morgana's image - with the copyright cropped - on a tale about Renczi in September last year.

Was that the extent of the Mirror's research? Didn't they think the image was suspiciously high-quality given Renczi was - apparently - born in 1903?

Morgana added:

you would think newspapers would know better before printing a double page spread with a pic they don't own.

(Hat-tips to Patricia/Morgana, Aaron, Matt and benjymous)

4 comments:

  1. You'd be surprised as to how many idiots can work for a newspaper when you look at research results like this.

    ReplyDelete
  2. What's even more amusing is that Vera probably didn't exist at all, at least not in the form that the Mirror is regurgitating from blogs and wikipedia articles. The only evidence of her is 1920s American press, nothing from her home country. Perhaps Vera is an original victim of tabloids ramping up sensationalist stories to sell papers.

    ReplyDelete

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