Newsrooms Rely on Satellite Imagery
Newsrooms are increasingly turning to private satellite imagery firms for rapid verification in conflict zones. This shift makes vendor selection and chain-of-custody for visual data a key procurement challenge, as outlets weigh the speed of commercial providers against the complexities of economic dependency and image authentication.
The use of satellite imagery in journalism dates back to 1986, when images from the French SPOT satellite revealed the extent of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, bypassing Soviet restrictions on information. In the 1980s, the cost of a single satellite image could range from $35,000 to $73,000. Today, newsrooms can access a wide range of free, open-source satellite data from providers like the Copernicus Sentinel program and the USGS/NASA Landsat program. These resources offer resolutions sufficient to identify individual buildings, making them valuable for tracking land development and environmental changes. For higher-resolution needs, commercial providers like Maxar, Planet Labs, and Airbus Defence and Space offer imagery with details down to 30 cm, capable of identifying individual vehicles. The Syrian civil war marked a turning point, demonstrating the power of combining commercial satellite imagery with open-source intelligence (OSINT) and user-generated content from smartphones. This fusion of data allows for robust verification, a practice now central to visual forensics and pioneered by organizations like Bellingcat, which uses crowdsourcing to analyze and geolocate events. Artificial intelligence is increasingly used to analyze vast datasets of satellite imagery, detecting patterns that would be impractical for human analysts to find. Machine learning algorithms can be trained to identify specific objects or changes over time, such as tracking deforestation, illegal mining, or the construction of military installations. This allows journalists to quantify the scale of an event and provide crucial context. However, the reliance on commercial providers introduces challenges, including the potential for censorship or blurred imaging over sensitive government sites. The digital manipulation of satellite images, akin to video "deepfakes," also presents a growing threat to their credibility as objective evidence. To counter misinformation, news organizations are becoming more transparent about their verification processes. This includes cross-referencing satellite data with other sources like weather data, architectural databases, and on-the-ground reporting to build a comprehensive picture. Methodologies now often involve analyzing metadata, shadows, and reflections to authenticate imagery.
