A number of news outlets have used this handout photo from BP showing the company’s nerve center:
One leeeeetle problem: The photo has been altered. And badly. The folks at AmericaBlog — a left-wing blog — dissected the photo on Monday.
AmericaBlog‘s John Aravosis writes:
I guess if you’re doing fake crisis response, you might as well fake a photo of the crisis response center. Why do they need a fake photo at all? Don’t they have a real crisis response center they could have used?
A couple of quick excerpts:
As if that wasn’t enough, Aravosis says the meta info in the original photo shows it was taken in 2001.
Not wanting to leave it at that, AmericaBlog added a nice little sarcastic touch to its post:
Heh. Not bad.
Last night, the Washington Post picked up the story. In that story, BP responded:
“Normally we only use Photoshop for the typical purposes of color correction and cropping,” [spokesman Scott Dean] said in an e-mail. “In this case they copied and pasted three ROV screen images in the original photo over three screens that were not running video feeds at the time.”
Dean said BP usually has a couple remotely operated vehicles on the surface at any given time for maintenance.
“We will replace the Photoshopped version currently on bp.com with the original image tonight,” he added. “We’ve instructed our post-production team to refrain from doing this in the future.”
Here’s the new “unaltered” version BP is distributing today:
And here’s a side-by-side comparison:
Find BP’s handout photos here. Find the Washington Post story here. Find the AmericaBlog here.
Thanks to Ernie Smith for posting about this last night in his Short Form Blog.
