A leading news agency has apologized to a Ugandan climate activists after she was cropped from a photo in which she had posed with her white peers after a youth climate science in Davos, Switzerland.
Vanessa Nakate had posed for the photo alongside featuring prominent climate activists Greta Thunberg, Loukina Tille, Luisa Neubauer and Isabelle Axelsson.
When news of the event was published by Associated Press, a US news agency, Nakate noticed that she had been cropped out of the photo.
In a video statement released online, which has since gone viral, she said: “This is the first time in my life that I understood the definition of the word racism.”
She went on to say: “I see the photos and I clearly see how I was cropped out of the photos. My message was left out, and my photo was left out as well.”
Tweeting about the incident Nakate said: “You didn’t just erase a photo. You erased a continent. But I am stronger than ever.”
Responding to the criticisms Lauren Easton, director of media relations at AP, apologized for the incident.
She said: “We regret publishing a photo this morning that cropped out Ugandan climate activist Vanessa Nakate, the only person of color in the photo. As a news organization, we care deeply about accurately representing the world that we cover.”
Easton added: “We train our journalists to be sensitive to issues of inclusion and omission. We have spoken internally with our journalists and we will learn from this error in judgment.”
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Absolutely dispicable behavior.
The environmentalist movement is anti-development, the western nations that promote it are already developed. It is inherently a white thing, a is not a black thing, The Voice have been slow to wake up to that. The Voice have also been slow to understand that this also applies to the EU.
That was no error that was deliberate !