Fauxtography

Michelle Malkin, and plenty of other bloggers, have been all over the MSM's doctoring of photographs, from using Photoshop to "enhance" or alter an image, to staging events, to providing misleading captions to images. There's no real doubt that this is happening. Reuters has admitted publishing doctored photos. The cover of US News that Malkin shows is quite clearly a tire fire, not some aftermath of an air strike, or the wreckage of an Israeli jet as Time claims. It only takes a pair of eyes to look past the smoke and the gun.

What's shocking to me is the supreme arrogance of the MSM to think they can get away with something like this in the age of the blogger, where millions of people will be scrutinizing everything and publishing their findings to a global audience. Have they learned nothing from Rather-gate? Granted, sometimes the bloggers get it wrong, as James Taranto found out. But the blogosphere worked the way it often does, and the error was pointed out and Taranto acknowledged it. More often than not, though, the blogs get it right and the MSM is embarrassed time and time again. Yet they persist in their arrogance.

It seems to me such nonchalance can only come from having gotten away with it for a long time, which makes you wonder how many other images we've seen on the news or in the papers over the years have been faked, or at least been used deceptively.