A visual verification tax comes due

In 2026, newsrooms face a new reckoning: Either you’ve built out visual investigative competence or you’ll pay the price in lengthy corrections, lost credibility, and missed opportunities.

The visual documentation available today — such as eyewitness images, satellite imagery, drone footage and other sensor data — offers journalists unprecedented amounts of material to craft stories from. However, this abundance comes part and parcel with the social platforms that are disseminating much of this visual material. These platforms systematically strip contextual information from images and videos. By design, the platforms leave out precisely the contextual details that are crucial for journalists who need to assess the credibility of the material.

Newsrooms that invested in “visual investigations” teams over the past decade understood this. A characterizing feature of these teams is how they often hire specialists from outside of journalism entirely — such as architects, human rights investigators, satellite experts or forensic analysts — to develop new practices that stay in step with an increasingly visually saturated and fragmented media landscape. They triangulate objects and people across sources, geolocate footage, and offer transparent chains of evidence.

However, most newsrooms did not make these investments in competence. This is in line with how several journalism scholars describe visual verification in general as being improvised, done ad hoc, and only belatedly codified through efforts such as the Verification Handbook series.

As we enter 2026, AI-generated, photorealistic imagery has become trivial to produce, while decontextualized “cheap fakes” continue to circulate across platforms with increasing velocity. This will contribute to making the gap in visual verification competence painfully obvious throughout 2026.

In 2026, the verification tax is coming due: You either invest in visual verification capabilities now or pay the price in credibility later. The verification tax represents the cost of operating in a media landscape where visual material is both everywhere and increasingly untrustworthy. For journalism, paying it entails either building the competence to assess eyewitness footage, satellite imagery, and AI-generated content, or ceding authority to those who can.

The verification tax comes due as reputational damage to newsrooms publishing inaccurate reporting. It comes due as missed scoops when journalists lack the skills to see stories in visual material. It comes due as depending on other newsrooms or platforms to do the work for you.

The good news: The core techniques of visual investigations aren’t magic. Geolocation, reverse image search, and cross-referencing against multiple sources can be learned efficiently. But for this competency to reach all journalists and be maintained, it will require the whole news organization to be on board with prioritizing it. This will typically hinge on whether you view such visual verification competency as a core journalistic skill your newsroom should possess, something for a dedicated newsroom firebrand, or just not important enough to prioritize.

The newsrooms that paid the verification tax early now have a structural advantage, while everyone else will keep paying at increasingly painful rates.