8/6/2006: Beirut Photoshop
 

http://cellar.org/2006/beirutphotoshop.jpg

IotD is not a political blog at all, and that's by design. On the rest of the Cellar, I personally enjoy talking politics all the time. But on IotD, when it comes to politics, what's mind-boggling to me might not be mind-boggling to you and vice-versa. And the mideast, well that's like the abortion of talking politics; everyone harshly, completely on one side or the other, bringing maximum outrage to the topic. Plenty mind-boggling about it, but the arguments weigh down the enjoyable side of mind-boggling very quickly.

So why this political entry about the mideast? I dunno, I guess I think this photo is mind-boggling no matter which side you're on. Let's see what you think.

The above photo is from the Reuters news service, and I found it in Yahoo! Most Popular today at 10:30 am. As of this writing, it's still there. The caption reads:
Problem is, it's Photoshopped. The repeating sections of smoke clouds are unmistakeable "clone tool" use.

The blogosphere caught this really fast -- because it's really bad work. The photo was then cancelled by Reuters:

http://cellar.org/2006/beirutphotokill.jpghttp://cellar.org/2006/beirutpicturekill.jpg

This might be the original:

http://cellar.org/2006/beirutunaltered.jpg

There are various non-political aspects of this which make it mind-boggling, and I think you can enjoy it no matter whether you love or hate Israel, no matter whether you love or hate Hezbollah, no matter whether your love or hate Lebanon.

Although perhaps "enjoy" is not the right word.

It is a sign of the times. But does it mean that our information today is LESS accurate, or is it MORE accurate? The tools make it easier to fake information... while at the same time, giving the skeptical audience a way to share notes and disseminate corrections.

One other note...

http://cellar.org/2006/hajjearlier.jpg

I've heard news service photographers say that when Hezbollah specifically sets up a shot, sometimes it's obvious that the photographers are being "fed" -- and some photographers refuse to shoot such situations. What do you take from the above shot?

What do you take, when you find out it was taken by Adnan Hajj, the same Reuters photographer reponsible for the Photoshop?

I, for one, don't know.

Good link at the bottom. Nothing surprising about their tactics, but good to see it being exposed.

Why would they have bothered photoshopping that? It looks about the same.

Because Arabs are way big into drama.

Anyway, those little girls were mere females (no big loss) and dying for your faith is the sure-fire way to Heaven, right? Only...only what do female martyr's get for their sacrifice? Surely not the same 70-some virgins the men are eagerly awaiting? Right? Right?

got to AMP it up some to make the pic look good .

The multiple plumes makes it look like the bombing/artillery is more indescriminate than it really was. That lack of precision is something that plays very nicely into the extremists hands. Of course, such an obvious plant could be put out there to create the impression that all complaints of indescriminate bombing are over-blown. confused yet?
edit smelling

For the same reason the sat images "showing the level of destruction in Beruit" was.

"World War III will be a guerilla information war with no division between civilian and military participation." --Marshall McLuhan

cock

:biglaugha :biglaugha :biglaugha

Are you now claiming those pictures I posted on the other thread were photoshopped? I know you scowled at the caption, but this takes your accusations to another level.

No, no, I'm not making that accusation at all. Insofar as I could see the WaPo image was the same as what CNN showed...although not at the same resolution.

But the (embedded) caption on the WaPo version itself was pure propaganda.

The images are best viewed to this soundtrack.

My guess is they brightened and added contrast to give the buildings in the foreground more definition. That resulted in the sky being bright white so they expanded the area of smoke to tone down the sky.

It's disturbing the editor, probably a photo editor, but at least a pro, didn't spot this as a fake immediately. Deadlines be damned, the whole story, and the agency for that matter, lose credibility.

One thing is apparent, though.....Hezbollah has used the media much more effectively than the IDF, from the git-go. :tinfoil:

Layer Style> Big Noisy Border
Window> Show Options
Select> All
Filter> Pixelate> Fragment
Layer> Flatten Image

And when US DoD "uses the media", they get criticized intensely for it. No reason to think IDF is any different; Israel has a left-wing too.
http://www.michaeltotten.com/archive...ry%20Media.jpg
Caption: "They do like to fashion themselves as media savvy."
http://www.michaeltotten.com/archives/001226.html

That coupled with their indiscriminate killing marks Hisballah as a terrorist organization in my book.

Armies win by beating their opponents into submission.
Terrorists win by tricking their opponents into thinking theyve been beaten into submission.

From time to time I think the mainstream will unravel.

http://drinkingfromhome.blogspot.com...t-edition.html

The same woman wails after her home is destroyed July 22... and again at another home, August 5.

Same photographer...

It happens way too much. Calling it anything but poor editorial judgement reveals too much tinfoil cap for my taste.

http://www.nppa.org/news_and_events/...rtha_cover.jpg

No doubt that is photoshopped.

and for sure, journos want to make their money and everyone wants to have shot the iconic shot. every photographer woudl like their vietnam moment, the photo that once seen cannot be forgotten.
www.vietnamwar.com/vietcongofficershootsman.jpg
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wpsrv/...y/gallery2.htm

But as for all the green helmet/white t-shirt stuff...yup, maybe they are going for the photo op, they won't be the 1st they won't be the last, but what you can't change about those images is: a dead kid is a dead kid.

chances of those kids being members of Hezbollah or any other terrorist organisation?

http://cellar.org/2006/hajjjuly24.jpg

Journalists are shown by a Hizbollah guerrilla group the damage caused by Israeli attacks on a Hizbollah stronghold in southern Beirut, July 24 2006. (Adnan Hajj/Reuters)

http://cellar.org/2006/hajjaugust5.jpg

A Lebanese woman looks at the sky as she walks past a building flattened during an overnight Israeli air raid on Beirut's suburbs August 5, 2006. (Adnan Hajj/Reuters)

"Overnight". Same building, two weeks apart.

But yeah Tippy it's not like they don't have other destruction to photograph. But the wire services should be better than this. The world depends on it.

I'm sure that what they meant was that the building was flattened during an overnight raid on some other night, and that the woman was walking past it on August 5. Just some bad caption writing. :rolleyes:

That photoshoppery has got to be the worst I've ever seen. And they fired the guy...Reuters should be fired. It is so bad, it might even be on purpose. Maybe its a political statement by the shopper. The Media will print nearly anything these days, and this is another fine example.

Analysis of another Reutersgate/Hajj image discovered to be doctored. (This is the one of the IDF F-16 "dropping bombs and launching rockets")

Yea and I remember when this ran!

They have now removed from their database all photos ever submitted by this guy.

The claim being that it's because they can no longer vouch for their veracity. I kind of suspect it's also to inhibit independant analysis to forstall any further embarassment.

Somehow I doubt that will be enough to inhibit the Pajamahedeen, who have proven Rather resourceful in the past. ;-) The Democrat Underground crowd is already floating the theory that Hajj is a plant. They must be rattled; last time it took a few weeks before they blamed Rathergate on Rove.

Christ Maggie, give it a rest. This has nothing to do with republicans or Democrats, right or left.:rolleyes:

It's about a major media source being hoodwinked by an unscrupulous correspondent.

The cellar covered this issue back at the beginning of the war with Iraq, http://www.cellar.org/showthread.php...doctored+image

You mean *another* major media source being hoodwinked by *another* unscrupulous correspondant. As to "no right/leftness", you've got to be kidding.

If they've got you looking for "right/leftness" in everything you see, then you're a slave to the ping-pong game, destined forever to vote "against" rather than "for" in every election, destined forever to be a willing participant in the contrived, superficial competition between "them" and "them" . . .

The lefty-rightyness of it comes from the MSM being 90% lefty*. So they didn't remove smoke from the photo. They didn't put the soldier in a less menacing position. They didn't find a memo that said Bush fulfilled his National Guard duty. And it's the righty blogs that fact-checked their ass.


*as a centrist i am the final arbiter on this factoid

Like this: New study detects media's liberal tilt which supposedly "scientifically proves" this idea that the "MSM" is "90% lefty" . . . "...the authors start by examining the ratings of members of Congress, according to Americans for Democratic Action (ADA)..." I tried to keep reading after that...and I don't really know who ADA is, or have any reason to think they swing one way or the other . . . but this isn't science. This subject isn't something that can be scientifically studied. It's like "scientifically" debating whether God exists without establishing a definition of what God even means. You can't base science on the shifting sands of perception . . . what does "liberal" mean exactly? Putting alot of gravy, a "liberal" amount on your mashed potatoes? that debate would be based on source data from Americans For Tasty Side Dishes (ATSD) - but the catch is the source data isn't scientific data!

And it's our old relativist friend "moral equivalance" again...

I don't have to "look for right-leftness in everything" when it comes to the MSM: it's honestly and clearly already there. It's being blind to it that's your problem, which causes you to think there's nothing to it.

You really beleive Reuters is politically neutral? You need to broaden your news sources beyond BBC, CNN and NPR.

No, I just opt out of the "left versus right" mudslinging because I find it counter-productive to any meaningful dialogue.

That's quite a confession of ignorance for someone who wants to argue about right vs. left.

My entire point is that I don't want to argue about left versus right.

How could you have missed that?

I too want to escape the usual he-said-she-said of what is considered mainstream politics, because the bogus debate is hurting America (ref Jon Stewart re Crossfire) and is tedious.

But I can't help but notice that everyone has a bias, a narrative on what happened, everyone is in schools of thought which influence their point of view.

I would like them to admit the bias so that I can sort of triangulate on the truth. But they don't admit it, so I am left to work it out myself. What a pain in the ass!

I don't think that you can declare allegience to an unspecified category, if that makes sense. The problem here is the fallacy of impartiality: we are all biased, as human beings. But trying to lump us into two clean groups is just plain silly.

I honestly don't think anyone who had actually seen this photo (IE did their job) could have possibly published it on purpose, or expected nobody to notice that it looks like it was doctored with Microsoft Paint.

Your argument is that right vs. left is irrelevant. You can't do that intelligently without knowing what it is you're dismissing.

I'm dismissing the notion that we can be so easily manipulated by an "us versus them" distraction when the two "sides" agree on 99% of the things that are really going to matter in the long run. It's worse than "east coast versus west coast" - but in this case, it isn't just rap albums that are for sale.

This is the blindness that sets in that causes you to see what you want to see. How could anybody have failed to notice that the Rathergate memos were produced with Microsoft Word?

There's really more than two sides, and the differences between them *are* significant. You can't elucidate the underlying principles and values by just watching the behavior of politicians; they're constrained to the normative forces of the election process.

Nor can you ignore the underlying biases of any news source just because you find today's rhetoric and lack of comity distasteful; you have to factor in those biases when interpreting their reporting.

Point taken. But it is worthy to note that I don't watch TV.

That alone does wonders. Really.

If not knowing what the ADA qualifies as a "wonder"...sure. As in "I wonder how you can discuss politics" perhaps. Not that you'd learn that from TV.

Of course PBS is radio too...and CNN, the NYT, Reuters and lot of other news sources are online.

So you highly recomend them as a good source of telling me what to think?
I couldn't bear it if I wasn't getting my spoon-fed opinions from fancy expert sources.

HEZBOLLYYWOOD !!!!!!!!!!!!!



New York Times has joined the fun. Some fake dead.

"New York Times Busted in Hezbollah Photo Fraud!

** Dead Men Walking! **

From the New York Times photo essay by Tyler Hicks on July 27, 2006 comes this unbelievable fraud!"

C'mon, could you tell? I read a ton of blogs on that one, as it was developing. It took a shitload of people that are knowledgeable on fonts, typewriters, military supplies, and the histories of each, batting in back and forth to come up with a consensus.
It was really fascinating to watch the dead ends and wrong conclusions reached. Then someone would chime in with another tid-bit of information, that would have to be checked and cross checked with several sources, then added to the verified info at hand.

It took the input of dozens of people, with sometimes obscure knowledge, to finally come to, not a guess, but a verifiable answer. No one person could say yes or no.

And you say how could anyone overlook it? :eyebrow:

Or what you perceive to be bias.

How can they admit to your perceptions of their position, if they don't feel they are bias:question:

Yes.

I suppose I qualify as "knowlegable on fonts and typewriters", as well as having been in the military in the 1970's. A lot of my work in the 1980s was in typesetting and what was called at the time "word processing".

But an alleged memo from the 1970's in Times New Roman? Please.

It only took a ton of people to overcome the outlandish scenarios concocted to try to save the theory that those crude forgeries were genuine.

Maples and Rather had the paid advice of experts, and ignored it because it contradicted what they wanted to beleive. Too much of the press longs to become the living reincarnation of Woordward and Bernstein...more faux nostaligia.

I knew it immediately too. It's partly a "computer person" thing, partly a lifelong interest in fonts and typesetting and printing. You remember how documents were created and how they looked through history. How expensive it was to print certain ways.

I looked at it for about three seconds and knew they had been caught. Like my eyes had been sensitized to spot things - it felt at first like a "Beautiful Mind" moment. And then I proceeded to laugh my ass off for the rest of the week as various sides lined up as they looked to first defend the document, and then to say it was fake but accurate. It was great entertainment.

I wound up not voting for Bush... I point that out to say, all my excitement for this has little to do with the politics of it, and everything to do with the Internet, enabling this army of fact-checkers to go to town. And how news changes in the net era.

In fact it will be a great sign that things have changed when the lefty bloggers do the same thing. But they have bigger fish to fry - they've just caused a powerful incumbent Senator to lose a primary on issues, something that just never happens without a scandal.

Whereas the doctored photo is visible to the naked eye, with no specialized knowledge or training necessary. We have evloved to intuitively pick up on patterns seen in nature. Also...nobody could theorize that "the crude forgery was genuine" because the wrong-ness of it is clearly visible, at a glance, to anyone who is not legally blind.

"Paint versus Word" is a very clever comparison, but doesn't quite get there.

How can they admit to my perceptions of bias? Good question I think they should just stop trying to say they're not biased. Stop trying to say that what's being presented is the objective Truth.

People say to me how can you watch that Fox News crap. It's simple, you just watch it with the thought in the back of your mind that it's biased and crap. Then you get more information. You don't even have to like them. I don't like my neighbor's dog, but his barking does give me information. I don't like all the blogs out there, some of them are just "echo chambers" for people who like to be with other people who think just like they do. But they come up with good information.

At the root of this is the fact that there is no such thing as objective truth.

But we won't go there in this thread.

I dislike Michelle Malkin, I think she is annoying and a total bitch and often completely wrong. This morning her post on more Lebanon coverage is must reading. First a NY Times caption is shown to be bogus as an injured man in one photo is shown in other photos to be merrily walking around.

Then a US News COVER is shown to be entirely bogus as the fire and ruins of an Israeli jet turn out to be... a tire fire!!!

I listen to Sean Hannity's talk radio show sometimes. Surprisingly, I don't always disagree with him 100%. But seriously, if you don't percieve a bias in your favorite news source it just means they share the same bias as you.

Yes Sir, Sir! ha ha ha :::slinks off to philosophy forum:::

I'm getting very irritated with news coverage. A "funny" bit about this stuff is that civics teachers are always telling the kids not to believe anything on the net, check with legitamit news sources. Then we have these situations where the net has to do the fact checking on our media filters.