Good, Bad, and Ugly

Many people are linking through Yahoo to a photo you’re running of someone in boots walking on the US flag in Zuccotti Square.

It’s a hackneyed cliche, of course, that protestors hate their country. In this case, the photo seems to have been faked. I am not a Photoshop expert, but the light looks wrong, the edges look wrong, the shadows under the boots seem wrong.

More obviously, the stripes on the flag are completely incorrect. Why are you running this photo at all? Did someone hack your website?

A photo like this destroys your credibility completely. It’s bad journalism and a threat to democracy–further, it feeds conspiracy theories on both the right and the left. As a citizen of the US, I feel angry, as a sometime reporter I feel betrayed, and as a veteran I am apalled. Pull your heads out, really.

Nac

I can see criticizing the person in the photo, and maybe even the person responsible for the badly made flag, but in my opinion this is a perfectly legitimate news photo.

I don’t get why you think it “feeds conspiracy theories on both the right and the left,” and I can’t imagine why anyone would bother to Photoshop something like this. GBU Editor

A member of the Occupy Wall St movement walks over a U.S. flag on that lies on the ground in Zuccotti Park near the financial district of New York October 13, 2011. REUTERS/Lucas Jackson

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