snapped shot

Whoa... a fauxtographic exposé from my favorite data mining expert? Awesome!

This is off topic, but given that it is about news media and a little about science, I thought I'd squeeze it in. ABC News has an article today, authored by Ashley Phillips, about pollution in American cities. The article is fronted with an image of Pittsburgh (on top of the list of polluted places) in all its smoggy glory. However, the image includes the Three Rivers Stadium. This stadium was demolished early in 2001. So why post an out of date image with this story? Are the images of the other cities somehow incorrect as well? Perhaps the image is doctored to boot.

I'm guessing that 'news' sources of this type have a constant stream of such inaccuracies - more strength to the fifth estate and algorithmic news.

One can only imagine that the ABC News staffer that was responsible for picking a photograph to accompany a story about Pittsburgh's pollution was on a tight deadline, and picked the most polluted-looking of the pictures from their archives. Why did the editorial desk not catch this glaring error? I'll leave that up to reader speculation, because I know I probably wouldn't have caught it.

Great catch, Matthew! We'll make a "fauxtography" expert out of you, yet!

Update: Leave it up to the good folks of Stinky Journalism to get the problem solved, and fast! After a brief call to ABC, Rhonda Shearer managed to get them to completely replace the photo in the story.

Of course, the new photo they selected dates back to 2003, but hey, it's better than it was before! Here's the original caption, for your reference:

The skyline of Pittsburgh is seen through the morning haze from across the Allegeheny River Wednesday, July 2, 2003. While air pollution declined both statewide and nationally from 2000 to 2001, in Allegheny County, where Pittsburgh is, it increased by about 20 percent, according to the Environmental Protection Agency. (AP Photo/Keith Srakocic)

Great job, Rhonda!

A handful of people on the liberal side of the blogosphere are in an uproar over the background of this photograph, taken of President Bush and Pope Benedict XVI by Ron Edwards/AP.

What the heck was going on? How did that Confederate flag get there? The South lost the Civil War and that flag is an egregious symbol for African Americans. Can anyone in the Bush administration explain this? No, it is not awesome, Dubya, it's insensitive and wrong.

Fortunately for Kaz, no explanation is necessary at all. If you look very carefully at the picture, you'll notice that the "Confederate" flag pictured has a field of blue below it (right underneath President Bush's hand), and that there's a small portion of red visible in the lower right-hand quarter.

Ring any bells?

No?

Okay, here's another hint: The flag of Illinois Indiana [Ed.: Oof, that hurts the team! Thanks for the correction, Sean M.!] is right next to the Pope. Now, seeing that there's a State flag next to him, what do you suppose the odds are that the flag behind Mr. President is also a State flag.

I'd say the odds are darned good.

Alas, once again we have the pleasure of showing that the whole world is not a conspiracy.

Here's something else to consider:—In the following Reuters caption, I've highlighted Palestinian-sourced claims in terrorist red, and Israeli-sourced claims in Zionist blue. The sources, which were both indicated in the caption, have been underlined.

The resulting balance?

Judge for yourself:

A wounded Palestinian is carried to the hospital after an Israeli tank shells a building near the Nahal Oz terminal in Gaza April 9, 2008. Two Palestinian militants and a civilian were killed by Israeli tank shells that hit a building near the Nahal Oz terminal, Palestinian medics said. The Israeli army said it fired at gunmen. REUTERS/Ismail Zaydah (GAZA)

I suppose I should at least be happy that Reuters bothered to ask the IDF what it was doing. 'Course, they could have always checked those dastardly Forces' useful website.

Reuters has issued a very interesting correction to its recent declaration that Muslims now outnumber Catholics worldwide:

We got quite a few e-mails about this one, and the readers were right. We corrected the reference to denominations, which left us comparing apples with oranges, raising the question of whether we should have done the story at all: GBU Editor

Of course, since Reuters had a clear agenda to fit—namely, the enablement of Muslim extremists—one can understand a certain rush to get things in print. One can even understand how pesky little things like "fact" and "context" can manage to get lost within the finer details of the extremely obvious.

But hey, at least they have acknowledged their erroneous haste after the fact. Better late than never.

A new think-tank has been formed to address the constant imbalance in reporting on Israel. I highly recommend adding them to your bookmarks. (h/t CAMERA Snapshots—no relation)

It's amazing how the number of the "martyred" in any given Israeli "attack" tends to swell upon each retelling. For example, here's what the Associated Press reported earlier today:



Not to be left out of the latest Jihadi du jour, Reuters was on the scene as well. Their report, however, is slightly different than the AP's telling of the story:



All this aside, it is pretty clear (WARNING: Morgue shots) exactly how many Hamas militants were killed in this strike, which makes Reuters' exaggeration of the story somewhat befuddling.

Aha, that's what it is—Reuters is grouping two additional jihadis in their body count, but attaching it to an irrelevant photograph. The people in the picture above (notice that the same man is present in the two main photos presented here) weren't necessarily being "told" that "up to eight" Hamasiacs had been killed, but rather had just gotten out from seeing the six present.

Reuters is still wrong, by the way. Only six were killed in an airstrike. The other two, as the AP correctly points out, were killed in "clashes with troops."

Two huzzahs for that vaunted fact-checking.

Apparently, no matter whether Israeli cities are located within its pre-1967 "occupation" borders or not, they are all merely "settlements." From CAMERA Snapshots (no relation):

In the BBC mindset, terrorists rocketing civilians in the southern Israeli city of Sderot are simply "militants targeting settlements." That is how BBC explains the situation.

A Jan. 28th aricle on BBC's Web site, "Fresh efforts to seal Gaza border" explained Israel's blockade on Gaza as follows:

Israel began tightening its blockade of the Gaza Strip after an increase in rocket attacks by militants targeting its settlements near the border.

Israel withdrew its military and civilian settlements from the Gaza Strip in 2005. Sderot—the prime target of Palestinian rocket and mortar fire—is a city in the western Negev, well within Israel's pre-1967 borders. Yet it is still a "settlement" to BBC journalists who consistently label Israeli settlements "illegal under international law". Does this mean that BBC now considers all of Israel to be "illegal under international law"?

Looks like the BBC is collectively due for a course in basic cartography. I won't be holding my breath.