Huffington Post admits ‘incorrect’ Jeane Napoles photo
MANILA, Philippines – The Huffington Post has taken down its story on Jeane Napoles and her tax evasion charge that had spread on social media due to a photo it posted alongside its article of a woman bathing in money.
Three days after an INQUIRER.net report was released on October 12, the American online news aggregator posted an erratum to clarify that its initial report was “incorrect” and that the image was a “stock photo” on the Internet.
On October 15, Huffpost replaced the entire article with a two-paragraph statement with a headline “Image Of Woman Bathing In Cash Is A Stock Photo, Does Not Depict Jeane Napoles [CORRECTION].”
Huffpost said:
“Editor’s Note: An earlier version of this post incorrectly stated that Jeane Napoles, a 23-year-old Filipino woman, had posted a photo to her social media accounts, depicting herself in a bathtub full of money.
That photo, which was shared from a Facebook account listed under the name Jeane Lim Napoles, does not depict Napoles but is in fact a commercially available stock photo.
Jeane Catherine Lim-Napoles is the daughter of detained businesswoman Janet Lim-Napoles, the alleged mastermind of the multibillion-peso pork barrel scam involving lawmakers and government officials.
The younger Napoles was sued for tax evasion by the Bureau of Internal Revenue (BIR) for allegedly failing to declare her multimillion-peso properties.
The US-based news website linked the correction to cutcaster.com, an online database of free images where the HuffPost had taken the “Napoles photo”.
The same image was originally posted in the Facebook page Jeane Lim-Napoles.
Other international news websites that used the photo – news.com.au and dailymail.co.uk – have not made similar posts.
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