Posted by
on Friday, January 12, 2007 3:45:11 PM
Michelle Malkin is in Iraq with her group of bloggers, and they are covering US efforts there. Yesterday, there were photos posted on her site from Iraq. The last photo in the montage--the one of the young boy holding the American flag--was photo-shopped to remove the graininess of the photo, and fix the lighting of the shot. THIS FACT WAS ADMITTED ON HER SITE. In fact, it was Allah @ Hot Air that did it. He explains that today. But, the fools over at Democrat Underground are going ape-crazy over the image, and claim it is a phony picture. (Allah has the linksto the message boards there. You can follow his links. WE will not link to the nutcases.)This goes to show how completely unhinged these people can be. When the Reuters Fauxtogate scandal broke there were bloggers disseminating the images coming out of Lebanon in search of doctored photos or manipulated shots. Charles at Little Green Footballs led the charge, and busted several stringer photographers being used by Reuters. This was a legitimate scandal, as it was discovered that the manipulations were deliberate despite the excuse that they were simply trying to "clean up" the images.Allah did precisely that for Michelle. He also explains that Michelle does not have PhotoShop, nor does she know how to use it. She simply asked him to clean up the photo so it could be seen clearly. There is nothing wrong with that. After all, do we want to see a grainy image where the light and shadow do not look right? How many times have we seen those old Christmas photos from years ago when Uncle Bernie just could not get the picture right to save his soul?
(A particularly amusing one was when I received a dress for Christmas, and was holding it up. Unfortunately, my grandfather cut my head out of the photo, and it looked like my brother was holding it up instead. This led to some good-natured ribbing when the photos were developed.)
The point is that Michelle did not manipulate these photos. She was looking at them with a natural photo-journalist's eye, and noticed that it just did not look clean enough to post, but she wanted the photo posted regardless. Allah cleaned it up. And the freaks at DU have decided that there is a conspiracy there where there is none. Which simply goes to show the difference in thinking from both sides of the blogosphere.
We uncover real malfeasance and mistakes made by the media. They invent it, and if they tell themselves the lie long enough, they will believe it. Too bad that telling themselves the same thing over and over does not lend any evidence to back up their argument.
Marcie