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Fake or Real...you decide

Is the Photo Photoshopped?

  • Yes, looks faked

    Votes: 83 77.6%

  • No, looks real

    Votes: 10 9.3%

  • Can't tell

    Votes: 9 8.4%

  • On planet X and the ME, fake is real.

    Votes: 5 4.7%
  • Total voters
    107
Rob Lister said:
Well, Tragic. You and a few others are official members of the "I'll believe anything" club.
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Oh, whatever. I was merely pointing out that deciding "real or fake" of a photo on the internet requires more than just armchair "OMG! IT'S TEH FAKE!!!!" sort of analysis. I should have realized this had something to do with that most boring of topics, Israel and Palestine, and left you to flog whichever dead horse you have in that tedious race.
 
Clearly some photos are so very fake that an 'armchair' critic and do just that...correctly.

Reuters got played, useful idiots that they are.
You too got played, but there's no reason to suspect you should have know better.
 
Rob Lister said:
Well, Tragic. You and a few others are official members of the "I'll believe anything" club.
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Yup. Your link is pretty damned conclusive. The cloning was blatantly obvious, and "keeping an open mind" about it was nothing of the sort: it was purely an effort to deny the obvious. Here's the replacement photo:
LBN20_wa.jpg


If this one's a fake, I can't tell, but it looks real to me. But the first one? You've got to be an imbecile to think that repetitive pattern in the smoke was anything other than the result of a crude cut-and-paste job.
 
TragicMonkey said:
I should have realized this had something to do with that most boring of topics, Israel and Palestine, and left you to flog whichever dead horse you have in that tedious race.
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Um, it's Israel and Lebanon, not Israel and Palestine. And the integrity of a major news wire service has relevance well beyond this conflict. Do you have a horse in that race? Or does it just not matter to you when the information source that so many people rely upon cannot be trusted?
 
Ziggurat said:
Um, it's Israel and Lebanon, not Israel and Palestine.
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Which all goes back, inevitably, to Israel and Palestine. At least on this board, it does.

And the integrity of a major news wire service has relevance well beyond this conflict. Do you have a horse in that race? Or does it just not matter to you when the information source that so many people rely upon cannot be trusted?
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Oh, I don't trust a lot of things. I'm not about to tell other people what they should or shouldn't trust. I just wish they'd think a little about the things they're trusting or not trusting. Beyond just "real!" and "fake!"
 
So, conspiracy or cock up?

There's no way such a blatant forgery should have got past a half decent photo editor, certainly as it came from the same source as the contested Qana imagery.

Mr Hajj is almost certainly a Muslim, and while that does not preclude him having a neutral position it is certainly something to consider, given the loyalty to your coreligionists that is demanded by the Quran.

At the same time, photojournalism is a competitive business and the pressure to produce the ultimate "dead baby held up against the background of an expanding mushroom cloud" photograph to sate the crude emotive requirements of the media must be strong.

The fact it is such a bad forgery also raises some questions. There are some dodgy looking patches in some of his earlier photographs, but nothing quite as crudely obvious as that photo.

This is probably nothing but an episode in sophistry, Reuters will effectively cover their arses again (hey, they managed to shrug off death threats being sent to Charles Johnson from the office where the Media Relations guy from the MCB works..).
 
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RyanRoberts said:
So, conspiracy or cock up?
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My guess is a cockup made possible by bias. They should KNOW that their locally-hired stringers need to be watched carefully. But they don't watch their output carefully, but just accept it without any real oversight. Conspiracy? Probably not on the part of Reuters - if it was a conspiracy I would expect them to have done a better job with the forgery. But that shouldn't get them off the hook either: they need to do a lot more than just fire that photographer to make up for this.
 
TragicMonkey said:
Some of us don't have Photoshop.
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Most people do have some photo-editing software.

Wait, so you accept the similarities as evidence of fakery, but dismiss the differences as natural computer behavior?
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Yes, because there is a big difference between differences because of computer behaviour and differences because of having different pictures.

Oh, whatever. I was merely pointing out that deciding "real or fake" of a photo on the internet requires more than just armchair "OMG! IT'S TEH FAKE!!!!" sort of analysis.
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You are absolutely right about that. For a lot of photos it simply is not possible to determine whether it is fake or real by armchair photo-analysts. For example I still see no reason to question the validity of the other photos by this photographer, even though some people see in this proof that he is untrustworthy. The way I see it, one overenthusiastic use of the clone tool is one thing. But getting a few dozen people to help stage photos involving dead children is quite another, and you can't prove that by pointing out such trivial 'inconsistencies' as "oh, no! This looks like it's on a different place" or "In one photo he's wearing an orange jacket and in another he's not."
 
Heh. You all got so wrapped up in the hoax that you missed the real significance of the photo. The image of Satan appears in the right-hand plume. It's true! :)

ETA: I just noticed even the horns are there.
 

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TragicMonkey said:
Has it? Or is the city in question just repetitive in architecture?
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I would consider that a possibility if not for the building under the 888 having the exact same dimensions (overall height, floor height, width). The only way that could happen if the building that is further away from the camera has the exact proportions increased by ~30%: not very likely.
 
FWIW, I just hacked the JREF polling software, and it seems that two of the people who believe the photo is authentic are Mary Mapes and Dan Rather. It's true! :)
 
Who knows? Another possibility is that the photo Rob posted is a real one that was smeared around to look like it was faked.

The version on LGF looks much more normal than the copy posted here.

I am supposed to believe that a bunch of journalist hacks are sitting in the middle of a war zone photoshopping fake burning buildings while real ones were burning outside.

MSNBC has quite an array of photos today.
Nobody needs boring pictures of a smoking building when there are comparison satellite photos of almost an entire city block leveled in Beruit. Or the flash of an apartment complex going up in a huge fireball.

Can't do any analysis at all on a 25k image. There is too little of the original left. Sounds a little too much like conspiracy theory stuff. Except for BPSCG's face sample, man I can see that clear as day. :D
 
Kopji said:
I am supposed to believe that a bunch of journalist hacks are sitting in the middle of a war zone photoshopping fake burning buildings while real ones were burning outside.
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Amazing isnt it?

You don't have to believe it. Your belief doesnt effect the reality. It is precisely what those hacks apparently did.
 
I don't get it. Why bother? This is very disturbing.

This is the second time something like this has happened to me. When Rathergate got started, I asserted that the documents couldn't be forgeries, because they weren't worth forging.

I guess I don't understand the mind of someone who thinks these things are all that important. The Israeli Air Force is dropping bombs and missiles. Why fake it?
 
Meadmaker said:
I don't get it. Why bother? This is very disturbing.

This is the second time something like this has happened to me. When Rathergate got started, I asserted that the documents couldn't be forgeries, because they weren't worth forging.

I guess I don't understand the mind of someone who thinks these things are all that important. The Israeli Air Force is dropping bombs and missiles. Why fake it?
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I'll leave you with that quandry. Rest well on it.
 
rockoon said:
Amazing isnt it?

You don't have to believe it. Your belief doesnt effect the reality. It is precisely what those hacks apparently did.
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I missed the evidence on that one, can you point me?
thanks
 
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