The Daily Kos blog has posted this image, from an unidentified source in Iran, showing a newspaper's depiction of a demonstration in support of President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. As you can see, elements of the crowd have been cloned, evidently to fill gaps and make the rally seem larger.
This looks like a textbook-worthy example of information manipulation, but there's still a lot we don't know about this photo. When was it shot? Who shot and distributed it? Who altered it? When was this page published? And what is this newspaper?
UPDATE: Two readers who read Farsi have helped us out with the translation. "Its a hardline paper and some of the heading is missing or covered," one says. The sentence that's partly visible reads: "The unrivaled attendance of people in the election..." Another reader offers this translation: "Unprecedented millions of people are going to finish the job..."
Despite the alterations to this particular image, we've seen legitimate news sources publishing photographs of large pro-Ahmadinejad rallies this week. Ahmadinejad was the official winner of the recent Iranian election, though supporters of opposition candidate Mir Hossein Mousavi have assembled in massive crowds in recent days to contest the results. Several people have been reported killed in clashes between authorities and opposition protesters.
2 comments:
When news is filtered, as all media outlets are currently in the nation of Iran by government order, any leak of information very valuable. However, as in this case we have to learn to question the validity of the information made available to us.
With the power of the internet, it is easy to see how images like the one shown here, can be quickly distributed world wide. And thanks to advances in technology, it is quite obvious some work was done to give the media outlets of the world a different perception of an event then really occurred.
Granted, all media outlets do this as well for concerts, events, etc. But given the political climate of the Middle East right now and a "free election" process, this brings a whole new level of journalistic integrity and manipulation into question.
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