I'm curious how one might demonstrate the veracity of this claim about photographs and videos.<p>> A photograph was inherently believable, unless obviously altered, in contrast to words, which were inherently malleable. When you viewed a photograph, it was innocent, unless proven guilty.<p>Consider the Cottingley Fairies, <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cottingley_Fairies" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cottingley_Fairies</a> , where two girls took pictures of fairies.<p>A lot of people believed them to be pictures of actual fairies. The images were not obviously altered.<p>Yet a lot of people did not believe them. The Wikipedia entry reports a Kodak employee commenting "after all, as fairies couldn't be true, the photographs must have been faked somehow".<p>Faked photographs had, after all, been around for decades, like <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victorian_headless_portrait" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Victorian_headless_portrait</a> or <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exaggeration_postcard" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exaggeration_postcard</a>.<p>That makes me think people understood that photographs - like text - were malleable and couldn't inherently be trusted.<p>> Video had the same default. A video was inherently truthful, unless labeled otherwise.<p>Movie SFX started in 1895, with the faked beheading in The Execution of Mary Stuart (see it at <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Execution_of_Mary_Stuart" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Execution_of_Mary_Stuart</a>). Someone watching Méliès using the same technique in "The Vanishing Lady" (see it at <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Vanishing_Lady" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Vanishing_Lady</a>) might easily think it was a stage trick similar to what magicians did on stage.<p>After all, stage magicians have been around for a long time, pulling off tricks that seem impossible.<p>If people know they could be fooled by slight-of-hand in front of them, why should they think a recording was inherently believable?