Politifact: “Newsmax and Fox News have aired old, out-of-context photos of empty grocery store shelves in recent segments bashing President Joe Biden for the jammed-up supply chain that experts say is backlogged due the the coronavirus pandemic’s strain on the global economy. Shortages of labor and raw materials have certainly created bottlenecks at a time when shoppers are looking to spend. And photos of depleted shelves, like these from the Associated Press in October, have legitimately helped to illustrate that story.”
“But other photos that appeared on Newsmax and Fox News were taken as early as March 2020, and some were snapped in other countries. The conservative networks represented them as though they were current and taken in the U.S. ‘It is unprofessional and unethical to repurpose images from another time and place to illustrate a story that has nothing to do with the original context in which those images were made,’ said Nina Berman, the director of the photojournalism program at Columbia Journalism School. ‘Using a photograph which shows empty shelves because of a coming typhoon in Japan, or old images from the early days of panic pandemic buying, to make a point about the current state of the U.S. economy is a classic case of disinformation’. Newsmax and Fox News did not respond to requests for comment about the misleading photos.”