Corrupted image / Journalistic integrity

Today: David Roth, an editor and co-owner at Defector; and Parker Molloy, author of The Present Age, a newsletter about the intersection of media, politics, and culture.

Issue No. 190

I Am Not Sam Bankman-Fried
David Roth

Jeff Bezos Thinks Washington Post Readers Are Idiots
Parker Molloy

I Am Not Sam Bankman-Fried

by David Roth

It is some consolation that the photo of Sam Bankman-Fried that Google has listed as the top search result for my name for months is not nearly the worst available photo of Sam Bankman-Fried. There are some really rough ones, there—ones where he looks like the lost libertarian member of the Peanuts gang, ones in which he is making the sort of faces people only make when they are being photographed against their will outside a courthouse, a great many in which I found my brain somehow rounding whatever he was actually wearing up into a set of jumbo pajamas—but that’s not really the point. I am not Sam Bankman-Fried, is maybe the main issue I have with it. I might dislike the state of affairs somewhat less if I’d been confused with someone more photogenic than this particular prolific, infamous, and reliably underdressed financial criminal, but ideally for both Google’s purposes and mine this would be a picture of me. Which, again, I feel compelled to underline it is not.

It is possible to figure out how this happened in both the micro and the macro senses. The image ran atop a review I wrote of Michael Lewis’s book about Bankman-Fried for New York Magazine’s website; Google pulled it from Reddit, where it had populated automatically atop a thread of people talking about that story. Or, talking, anyway, about Bankman-Fried, and Lewis’s book, with that link and the photo that would wind up being made mine more or less incidental to it. There are other images alongside it in Google’s search results on my name—the portrait I’ve used as my headshot for the last five years more or less by default, a screengrab of me on a zoom call for a podcast, a somewhat more worrying one of me with a very wide/bad mustache that I had for less than five minutes taken while I was bothering my wife with the aforementioned mustache. None of these are really all that great, either—the portrait is good, but the ceiling for an image like this is where it is—but they are photos of me, and as such I can’t really argue with them appearing under my name.