Why does Yahoo News like to use irrelevant photos for their news articles?

Question

In one article about 1500 South Koreans gathering in Afghanistan to preach Christianity, the photo that accompanied the article showed dozens of "Afghans" (they look more like Pakistanis or Indians) looking at a wrecked car at an accident scene. In another article about a typhoon which wreaked havoc in China's Fujian province, the photo showed many villagers wading through a flooded street and they are obviously not Chinese. It looked like a flood scene from Indonesia or the Philippines.

Answer 1

I'm not personally familiar with the issue you describe (I get my news the old-fashioned way, from the paper), but if I had to make an educated guess, I'd lay the blame on shoddy journalistic standards caused by rushing to meet deadlines.

I'm currently in high school, and I work at a paper that is, unfortunately, not particularly excellent. I know that sometimes, when we're going to press the next day and can't find photos, there's a mad scramble to find something, anything, tangentially related so that we don't have a big hole in our page. Since web news usually demands a photo, and I'd imagine they have a template for posting as well, I figure that they might do the same. Similarly, if news is being posted just as it breaks, they might not have photos available yet, and so decide to recycle old photos instead.

For an exact answer, though, of course, you'd have to contact those at Yahoo responsible for the content.