The News Corp tabloids are going through a period of transition when it comes to images used in articles. While the Sydney-based The Daily Telegraph is increasingly using AI to illustrate stories, its southern counterpart the Herald Sun has held firm, instead choosing to retain human input for its graphic design.
Humans, however, are as prone to some of the same inexplicable gaffes as AI, as one article in the Herald Sun this week has highlighted. A recent anonymous “staff writers” effort from the paper was titled: “Eleven Victorian parties that were famous for all the wrong reasons”, and featured a section on infamous teenage party boy Corey Worthington.
An embedded image featured a photo of a shirtless Worthington wearing his trademark yellow sunglasses and a pink bedsheet wrapped around his waist, alongside former West Coast Eagles footballer Ben Cousins. Cousins is also shirtless, and depicted with a light-blue sheet around his waist.
The clearly edited composite image, which has since been removed, appears to have used a 2007 photograph from when the former Brownlow medallist was arrested for drug possession (the charges were eventually dropped) as one of its sources. It carried the caption “Worthington and a mate”, without an attribution.
Despite the caption, a bemused Cousins, who now works as a sports presenter at 7 News Perth, appeared to have little idea of who Worthington was, asking Crikey when contacted whether he was “that young fella from Queensland”.
Worthington, from the Victorian suburb of Narre Warren, hosted an open-invite house party in 2008, aged 16, that turned wild after the invitation attracted hundreds of teenagers on formerly popular social media site MySpace. Worthington’s subsequent appearance on Nine’s A Current Affair, where he was castigated by presenter Leila McKinnon, went viral after he refused to take off his sunglasses.
Cousins said he had not been aware of the image or article before being contacted by Crikey.
In a strange twist, a reverse image search done by Crikey appeared to possibly trace the source imagery for the Herald Sun’s photoshop back to… Crikey.
The top result when processed by image search engine TinEye was a 2008 Crikey article about Worthington that referred to him as “the new Hasselhoff”, presumably referring to his consistent shirtlessness. The article, where the image is no longer visible, made reference to a series of “novelty emails” that appeared to be circulating at the time, which may also have been the original source of the image.
Crikey asked Herald Sun editor Sam Weir where the Herald Sun sourced the image, and whether the composite image was created in-house. We also asked why Cousins was included in the article, whether he was contacted ahead of the use of his image in the article, and why the image had been removed. Weir did not respond in time for publication.
