THE AMERICAN THINKER:
[The TAT] article on the fake photo published on the New York Times website has spread far and wide in the blogosphere, and it picked up talk radio coverage from some of the big national shows. It even broke through just a bit to cable news talk. ... [The article] criticized the Times for running the picture without checking. I never implied they created the picture, or did anything other than let it get through their filter. I faulted the Times’ (ahem) editing process for appalling sloppiness. Here’s the key sentence:MY QUESTION: Is Keller an idiot or working for the enemy? Ditto the NYTIMES.
Not only did the editors lack the basic knowledge necessary to detect the fake, they didn’t bother to run the photo past anyone with such knowledge before exposing the world to it.
Although I didn’t discuss the picture being from AFP, I accused the Times of uncritically accepting a picture that must have been staged. If the artillery shell wasn’t used for an attack by a Predator, because Predators don’t fire heavy artillery, someone had to bring the shell there and pose it for a picture. We call such artifacts “propaganda.” In this case, enemy propaganda. ... The Big Question
What is Keller doing about this breach of misplaced trust on the part of his badly-informed organization? Isn’t it his job to fix the problem illustrated by his website having served as a conduit of enemy propaganda?There is no evidence visible to me that the New York Times is pursuing the matter of how AFP came to supply it with what amounts to a propaganda photo. If they are doing so, it is rather discreet. Call me crazy, but I think it should be of some deep concern that they are being fed fake photos from the French. ... The Times has not exactly done its part to undo the damage it did. The correction it published implicitly puts the blame on AFP. The misspelling of “ordnance” as “ordinance” speaks again to the lack of military exposure of the combined AFP/Times quality assurance effort.
But most importantly, [Keller's & the NYTIMES'] correction does not address the real significance of the error: the fact that the picture must be a fake, staged with a prop piece of ordnance, not a missile.
Bill Keller must have read my article before he responded to my article, no? If he is in the habit of sending responses to articles he hasn’t read, he is even more arrogant and careless than I thought. So assuming he read my article, he knows that he has published a fake picture.
1 comment:
Reliapundit,
I am a musician and a marketing guy, with no interest in weaponry at all, but even I can see that the damn shell landed upside down, which, I would imagine, is aerodynamically impossible, at the high speeds at which such shells travel.
I think it was probably wise for TAT to not outright accuse NYT of "working for the enemy", but me, being a smaller blogger, I'll go out on a limb.
A shell fired from a gun, of some sort, at speeds of hundreds of miles an hour, could not land, intact in the sand, in an upside down position. Something would have had to interfere with its flight pattern to have caused it to spin, and then, it would have landed, more likely, at an askew angle, rather than a right angle.
Another thing, a bullet fired from a chamber may become mishapen, but they are clean, from having been subjected to massive heat. That shell was corroded.
There was more than enough reason for suspicion, if ones radar were turned on at all.
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