Fake News is Bad News
So, I get up this morning and start going through my morning reading: Google News, Slashdot, Fox News, Al-Jazeera, BoingBoing… an article on BoingBoing caught my eye.
Some fellow named Kaloogian is running for Congress. He’s not anywhere near my district, so normally I could care less. But he just got back from a 10-day trip to Iraq and he wanted to set the record straight about how the war is really going by describing his visits with the troops and posting this picture he took in downtown Baghdad:
The problem is that it’s not Baghdad. It’s Istanbul (no, not Constantinople).
So Kaloogian immediately apologized for the mistake and replaced that picture with this one, which he says on his website “we took from Baghdad”:
Okay, I can buy that it might be Baghdad, but I strongly doubt he took this picture during his trip there.
There’s a handy program called “strings” that will strip out any text information from a file and dump it for you to examine. Here’s what strings found in the header of that second photograph when I downloaded it:
JFIF
!7Exif
Minolta Co., Ltd.
DiMAGE 7i
Adobe Photoshop Elements 4.0 Windows
2006:03:29 13:00:10
Picasa 2.0
PrintIM
0250
0220
0100
2005:07:13 19:50:27
2005:07:13 19:50:27
0100
JFIF
Those last two timestamps make it look like either Mr. Kaloogian has his computer’s clock off by about eight months, or the picture was taken in (or before) July of 2005. Oh, and the strings don’t match the headers of any of the other pictures taken on his trip.
March 30th, 2006 at 10:00 am
Super Sleuth!!! That’s so cool how you did that.
March 30th, 2006 at 10:50 am
I don’t know Kooligian either but what a weenie! Why do people lie and so poorly,too. Way to expose them.
March 30th, 2006 at 11:42 am
Liars suck. And not in that good way.
(Btw, did you mean *couldn’t* care less instead of could?)
March 30th, 2006 at 12:27 pm
Oops – you’re right, Lilith. My bad.
Geez, I’m writing like I talk now.
March 30th, 2006 at 10:40 pm
Sorry. No blog. No website. Don’t know how. But I’m sooo impressed that you knew how to research that. You have an A+ for the semester, young man.
I actually lurk here a lot because I’m impressed with your knitting, but this other stuff you can do just knocks me out!
March 31st, 2006 at 8:35 am
That’s pretty scary, dude – keep on using your powers for good, we appreciate it!
April 7th, 2006 at 4:47 pm
Here’s the decoded info on that image.
File name : Documents/UrbanBaghdad3.JPG
File size : 43059 bytes
Camera make : Minolta Co., Ltd.
Camera model : DiMAGE 7i
Date/Time : 2005:07:13 19:56:28
Resolution : 346 x 260
Flash used : No
Focal length : 35.5mm (35mm equivalent: 140mm)
Exposure time: 0.0013 s (1/750)
Aperture : f/6.7
ISO equiv. : 100
Whitebalance : Auto
Metering Mode: matrix
Exposure : program (auto)
Either tha datestamp on the camera was hosed, or they stole this pic from elsewhere. I’d opt for the later since none of the other images on that page had EXIF data.