Friday
(1)Glenn Reynolds has reported some recent photos purportedly showing flag drapped coffins at Dover Air Force Base are a hoax. According to a NASA headquarters statement, the pictures are actually of the coffins of the Challenger astronauts:
An initial review of the images featured on the Internet site www.thememoryhole.org shows that more than 18 rows of images from Dover Air Force Base in Delaware are actually photographs of honors rendered to Columbia's seven astronauts.
Apparently a number of news outlets fell for it hook, line and sinker.
Doesn't sound like "hoax" is the right word. My understanding is that the guy who requested them drafted his FOIA a little too broadly, and didn't realize what he'd gotten. Most of the pics apparently are of the soldiers, but some are not.
Posted by Spoons at April 23, 2004 10:30 PM
I can't say if it was intentional or not... but it sure as hell puts egg on the face of those who used them. I mean, eighteen rows of misattributed images.... that is rather a lot.
Someone, somewhere, effed up big time.
Posted by Dale Amon at April 23, 2004 11:32 PM
Well, maybe not hoax, but big-time US news sources grabbed the photos and ran with them without fact checking. Oopsie.
Over coffee this morning, I read the report on USA Today's Kelley scandal - which, if you haven't followed it, is the Jayson Blair scandal redux. Dude's been making up the news since 1991. One of the more amusing conclusions of the report was that a few minutes googling would've caught this guy out years ago.
Posted by S. Weasel at April 24, 2004 12:19 AM
I've come to expect this quality of reporting from our esteemed press industry. In other news, The New York Times errenously use the picture of Pete Coors (of the Coors brewery in Colorado) who's the Republican Senatorial candidate as a Ku Klux Klan murder who murdered a black sharecropper. The local press have a field day on this.
Posted by BigFire at April 24, 2004 03:04 AM
WE ARE WINNING – BREAKING NEWS ONCE MORE FROM DALE AMON
At least eight Iraqis have been killed and around 30 wounded in explosions in Baghdad's Sadr City today (24 April).
Five US soldiers were killed in a separate rocket attack on their base in Taji, 19km (12 miles) north of Baghdad.
In other words the ratio of Iraqi citizen to US military casualties is two to one – if you ask me, this is quite acceptable.
Posted by Unknown at April 24, 2004 12:51 PM
Ummm. Dale, the Germans in WWII managed to get waaaay better than 2:1 casualties against the Soviets . . . and they LOST BADLY.
A better quantification of how well the U.S. is doing might be:
Insurgents killed - U.S. troops killed - 3 * civilians killed by U.S. forces - 0.5 civilians killed by insurgents.
If that seems like a hard formula to keep above zero, it's because it is. Using the USG as a tool of liberation isn't particularly easy or simple.
Posted by T. J. Madison at April 24, 2004 03:10 PM
TJ, t'was not me, t'was the forger again. I've used my editorial powers to mark it as Unknown author. Just some nitwit.
Posted by Dale Amon at April 24, 2004 03:33 PM
You won't here the media admitting it f***** up on this, they will just go quiet on it, as they always do.
Who decides whether the public should know about a media blunder?
The media!
Being a journalist means never having to say you're sorry (The Washington Post springs to mind).
Posted by Zevilyn at April 24, 2004 05:54 PM
Say what now? In the very first pic on thememoryhole.org's gallery, I count... 20 coffins. Can somebody tell me how that is supposed to be atrributed to 7 astronauts?
Or is it that some of the pics being circulated are from the shuttle accident, but the entire collection isn't a hoax?
Posted by dg at April 25, 2004 06:09 AM
http://thememoryhole.org/war/coffin_photos/dover/clarification.htm
Posted by Ken Hagler at April 26, 2004 12:41 AM
This reminds me of the story of two men watching a sunset. The younger man said "and to think that ignorant people used to think that the Sun went round the Earth", and the older man (an astromomer) replied "and what would a sunset look like if they had been correct?"
Unless Dale Amon is claiming that no American soldiers have been killed in Iraq, it is logical to assume that they have coffins covered in the American flag.
That the wrong coffins have been shown misses the point - would the picture have been any different if the right coffins had been shown?
As for "unknown" who is he? I have recently been accused of forgery (a criminal offence) by Mr Amon although it now appears that Mr Amon is accusing "unknown" of forgery.
In my case I quoted a comment of Mr Amon from memory (and said I was quoting it from memory) - the comment was that "in a year" (or words to that effect) Iraq would be a "nice place to visit" (ditto) - I remembered the comment as being made about a year ago.
Well I am not "unknown" (in that I did not write the above comment), but even what he has done seems more in the line of satire than forgery.
Posted by Paul Marks at April 28, 2004 01:08 PM
Except it elicited a response other than humor from the next commenter, so Dale needed to clean things up. That's when satire becomes forgery.
Posted by alex at April 28, 2004 01:16 PM
