Markets

Blogger Embarrasses Big Media Over Faked Iran Photo

By David Weir

Updated on: July 14, 2008 / 1:47 PM EDT / MoneyWatch

It's happened again.

Big media execs are red-faced after a relatively obscure blogger broke the story that the photographs that many of them had published on their home pages online (and/or front pages in print) had been doctored in a clumsy attempt by Iranian authorities to pretend four missiles depicted in the shot had launched successfully earlier this week.

In truth, one of these four was a dud.

The "David" to big media's "Goliath" in this tale is a blog called Little Green Footballs, while the victim list is an all-too-familiar Who's-Who:

The Los Angeles Times
The Financial Times
The Chicago Tribune
nytimes.com
BBC News
MSNBC
Yahoo News
(among many others)

In defense of the decisions editors and art directors made across the industry, this doctored image had been circulated globally by the respected Agence France- Presse (AFP) on Wednesday.

On Thursday, AFP retracted the image due to its "digital retouch," but by then the damage had been done.

With the wide availability of photoshop programs that allow anyone to manipulate images, U.S. media are increasingly falling victim to pranksters. Yahoo News played on its home page a photo that supposedly revealed the existence of a never-contacted Amazonian tribe, complete with them pointing arrows up at the photographer's helicopter.

Some of the articles accompanying this photo claimed there were all kinds of Stone Age-type tribes never yet "discovered" throughout the mighty Amazon. To an old editor's ear, this sounded too good to be true.

And, of course, it was (too good to be true) because it wasn't (true). It was just another fake.

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