Lacking that military 'punch'? Do as Iran does- photoshop it!

On Wednesday a photo was published depicting missiles being launched by Iran's revolutionary guard. For those fearing Iran as a weapon-saavy loose cannon, this may have been a disturbing image. However, this story proved to be more comical than frightening in the end...

For you 'photoshoppers' out there, a quick glance will easily reveal a very bad 'cloning' job. For some reason Sepah News, the media arm of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, decided to fabricate an additional rocket into the photo using a cloned smoke trail and rocket from the real rockets. There a couple things that give this image away as an obvious dupe: 1) The smoke billows at the bottom are identical... that just doesn't happen... 2) the rockets are the same, just altered in size (this isn't a huge deal as this would be hard to discern in the real world), and 3) there has been additional brushed in 'smoke' in the rocket trail that has been obviously added (this is one defect that I have not seen talked about in many sources that are reporting on this). There are also a few clumped areas of offending pixels that are the result of a bad clone sourcing. This obvious manipulation was confirmed a day later when another photo surfaced depicting not 4, but 3 rockets (top photo: photoshopped version, bottom photo: original photo).

The funny part is this: BBC News, MSNBC, Yahoo! News, NYTimes.com and many other major news Web sites aired/published this photo without even doubting its validity. This had to have gone through an imaging department at some point. You're telling me that no one caught this prior to publishing? Umm... oops.

This begs the question, "Do you always believe everything you read on the newspaper or watch on the television?" Why in the world would Iran try to (badly) fake an additional missile into their photographs? Well thanks for asking, here's my take- militant countries like Iran know that one of their most powerful weapons (even more so than missiles and gun powder) is the US media. They know that the US as a nation gobbles this stuff up. We consume it, we integrate it, we allow only these news stories (that have been selectively picked to cause commotion) to shape our world view.

What gave me a chuckle was that this is not the first time this has happened. Iran was caught photoshopping another news story claiming to have discovered US weapons in Iran just a few months earlier; again, another blatantly botched 'clone job'.

In addition to the obvious benefit of getting a good laugh out of this, I'm glad that this happened. Maybe now we'll all be a bit more inclined to wake up and smell the pixels.