MMMM # 217 -- The Fake & The Mistake

     Photo-manipulation has become so common, Photoshop is a verb.
     Yet even in the days before computers, fakes were abundant. They may have been more difficult to produce, but the audience was less sophisticated and more easily fooled.
    49 years ago today I took this wildlife scene of a hippo at a waterhole.

     Hey! Give me a break! I was just a kid with a simple Kodak Brownie. And yes, you can see the chain link fence in the background if you enlarge it even a little.

     More recently, BP used photoshop to change a picture of their Gulf Oil Spill Command Center to make it, they said, more interesting.

     These days there are scores of programs to create fake photos, and even programs to generate fake news clippings, like this one:

On board The CSS Alabama

     During the Civil War, Mathew Brady and others took the first photos of actual combat. But fake photographs were also created. Some purporting to show the actual battle between The CSS Alabama and The USS Kearsarge. In reality the ships were too far off the coast at Cherbourge, France, for any camera of the times to capture. More recently, photos "found" at a flea-market of the ships' crews showed up online.

     There's a difference between fake and mistake, like the huge one CNN and FOX made in reporting last week's Supreme Court Obamacare decision.

     Both networks blew it when they reported the court had overturned the key part of the law...the mandate that everyone buy health insurance. CBS got the story right, but the producers unwisely let the correspondent stand live on camera paging through the lengthy complex decision, trying to figure out what it said! She should have been paired with someone to fill the dead air as she rushed read the decision. Of course that was still better than getting it wrong!

     Ironically, the Supreme Court also issued a decision that same day about fakery. The court found in favor of a man who had been charged with violating a law against falsely claiming to have been awarded military medals.

     The court decided you can't prohibit lying.

     A huge sigh of relief was head from the Congress.

[PLUS: There's another weekly column by The Alabama Media Group--what the newly three-times-a-week daily newspapers in Alabama are calling themselves---answering questions about the change. As far as I can tell, the answer to every questions has been: we've made a great decision and you'll have to adapt. And maybe that's all they can say!]

[The Monday Morning Media Memo is a regular feature of www.timlennox.com]