The Memory Hole has an interesting article exposing a doctored photo about the famous toppling of the statue of Saddam that appeared in the London Evening Standard (found via Plastic.com). It seems they manipulated the photo to increase the size of the crowd. I don't anything about that paper, if it is considered important, or reputable, or whatever. A blog entry in the World of Badger blog has this additional information:
Now the Standard's picture desk is apparently claiming it was only altered to remove the BBC logo, but to me this seems like the thin end of the wedge.But unless the BBC logo took up quite a large portion of the picture, I find that hard to believe. Posted by ahyatt at April 21, 2003 11:45 AM
Dres,
I saw a news story on a major network (can't remember which one, as I tend to flip through them) that discussed the same thing. Basically they said the images of Saddam's statue toppling were a bit misleading, as they were all supercloseups that filled the screen with the crowd. They showed the same images we all saw a million times, and then slowly panned back to show that the crowd was actually much smaller than it seemed, and that the plaza the statue sat in was mostly empty.
Yeah, I remember a discussion of this on other message boards, and the pro-war said "well, who ever said that there were lots of people?". I guess no one ever said it verbally, but selective editing was empoyed so that pictures and video imply a huge mass of people. It is quite deceptive, and people still think the Iraqis love the U.S. because of it.
Posted by: Andrew Hyatt on April 30, 2003 11:13 AM