Doctored Photo from the London Evening Standard



On 9 April 2003, the front page of the London Evening Standard (circulation: 400,000) contained a blurry image supposedly showing a throng of Iraqis in Baghdad celebrating the toppling of Saddam Hussein. What we are really looking at is an incredibly ham-fisted attempt at photo manipulation.



The source of the image is footage from the BBC. The Standard's paperboys were obviously allowed to clone and blur the image in numerous ways to make it look like a gigantic crowd. This was first exposed Simone Moore and posted on the UK Indymedia site. The image below is a dissection of the fakery by an IndyMedia user called Gnu and a Memory Hole reader called Daedalus.

The red circles show a man in a turban who appears three times. The purple circles highlight an unknown object that appears four times (it's smudged in its rightmost incarnation). The darker blue circles show two instances of an identical white object, disembodied arm, and partial male faces. The yellow ovals show a partial male face and another one or two objects that appear as a group thrice. Similarly, the orange ovals highlight some sort of conglomeration that was duplicated. The two lighter blue circles are around an indistinct blob that appears on top of itself, while the bright green circles show yet another man who appears twice in the scene.

The black circles show something a little different. Obviously, two different still-frames from the footage were used, because the man with sunglasses and white, open-collar shirt appears twice but in a different pose, as do the men on either side of him.

The green line indicates where the image was clumsily smudged in order to cover up the fact that it had been stitched together.



And take a look at the guy who's just to the right of center. His forearm is unnaturally long and very strangely shaped, becoming razor-thin at the wrist. What is this, a Salvador Dalí painting?



Below, The Memory Hole has cut and pasted some of the objects which reappear. They've been placed side by side so that there can be no doubt that they show the exact same thing.

Naturally, The Memory Hole is incensed at this blatant lie--drastically altering a news image in order to present as reality something that never occurred. Yet at the same time we're doubled over in laughter at the sheer incompetence of this hack job. Truly, Stalin's propagandists were doing the same thing better in 1930.






Update >>> People who write to the Standard about the contents of this page have been receiving this reply:

Our front-page picture of an exultant crowd in Baghdad celebrating the fall of Saddam's regime was a video grab taken from BBC News 24. As is customary practice on all newspapers, the TV station's small logos were removed and a replicated part of the background inserted.

The Memory Hole website alleges that the Evening Standard intended to deceive readers by inflating the size of the crowd. Wrong. It also claims we put together two different still-frames. Wrong again. It says a man with sunglasses and white open shirt appears twice in different poses. Not true.

Multiple still-frames were not used and at no time was there any intention to deceive our readers and indeed our readers were not deceived.

I hope this clarifies the matter for you.

Yours sincerely,

Jeannette Arnold
EDITORIAL MANAGER

In response, all I can say is, Look at the images on this page again. It's all right here. Even if you say that the two doppelgangers in the white shirt and shades aren't the same guy, how can you explain away the repetition of the exact same people and objects in the same positions? Although most repeated elements show up in the upper left portion of the image, many don't. Perhaps Saddam didn't just have an advanced WMD program--he had an advanced Cloning program, too! This would also explain his reported body doubles (none of whom has been found, by the way). That poor soul with the Daliesque arm must be the victim of radiation from Saddam's advanced nuclear weapons program.

I'd be more than happy to run the original still-frame from the BBC for a side-by-side comparison. Send it on, Jeannette.


Update >>> On 5 May 2003, the London Guardian ran a story on The Memory Hole's exposure of the Standard. Not surprisingly, the Guardian's reporter makes snarky comments about the MemHole and heavily implies that the butchered photo has not been inappropriately doctored. (Actually, the article wasn't written by a reporter. For some reason, the Guardian gave the assignment to the author of a novel about US Civil War photographers.)

He accepts at face-value the Standard's response that this was simply a still-frame from a BBC video and that the only change was getting rid of the Beeb's logo in the upper right corner. He apparently didn't ask the Standard to produce the original, unaltered source image. So I did:

To: feedback@mediaguardian.co.uk
From: russ@mindpollen.com

I read with interest the Guardian's article ["Faking It," May 5] about my site, The Memory Hole, exposing the Evening Standard's use of an obviously altered photo. Your reporter strongly implies that the photo isn't doctored in an inappropriate way and seems to accept the Standard's inadequate explanation. He singles out only one sign of the fakery, then tries to explain it away, as if this invalidates the whole charge that the photo is faked.

Did your reporter ask to see the original, unaltered image? I'd be more than happy to run the still-frame from the BBC as it was before the Standard changed it. Naturally, I'd prefer to receive it directly from the Beeb. It would've been especially helpful if the article had contained the URL of my page [www.thememoryhole.org/media/evening-standard-crowd.htm], so that the Guardian's readers could've judged for themselves whether the people and objects that reappear repeatedly throughout the photo were actually at the scene.


Read the Guardian's article, "Faking It"


http://www.thememoryhole.org/media/evening-standard-crowd.htm