AP publishes staged photograph as news

Original Photo and caption here.
The following content constitutes fair use for the purpose of legitimate criticism and satirical mockery regarding the Associated Press.

This is the original photo.

Now let’s deconstruct the caption:

A Palestinian, passed out from tear gas fired by Israeli troops,

Oh really?  Awfully convenient pose if he’s unconscious, which is what “passed out” means. The hand holding the key just so, and the hand raised as if he’s gripping the barbed wire which is really too far  in the background.  Clearly this man was conscious enough to follow the photographer’s instructions.

holds a key symbolizing the keys to houses left by Palestinians in 1948, during a demonstration

And obviously he’s still demonstrating, as he still has the presence of mind to hold up his symbolic key for the camera.  Rather than question the legitimacy of the Palestinians’ version of history, the AP acts as their willing waterboys, displaying Palestinian grievance theater to the rest of the world.

marking the 61st anniversary of “Nakba,” Arabic for catastrophe, in the West Bank village Bilin, near Ramallah, Friday, May 15, 2008. The rally marked the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians who either fled or were driven out of their homes during the 1948 war over Israel’s creation.

Either fled or were lured out, surely you mean. They thought the Arabs were going to win soundly when they attacked, so they fled or actually went to join their armies, but those stubborn Jews just refused to die, and now the Palestinians want to pretend they can just come back home like nothing happened, and yet still plot revenge.   They’ve turned this grudge into their entire culture.  I have no sympathy for the Palestinians whatsoever.

Now let’s have some fun with the picture.

The Keymaster and his mom from Lebanon?

I’m sure the Pallies would have very much liked to have a Photoshop master on their photo crew, but unfortunately their plot to send some of their guys to Gnomon and get some experience working at ILM before coming home, does not appear to have been completed yet.   This is my rendition of what would currently be their best attempt to ‘enhance’ the photo, ‘removing dust speckles and adjusting contrast’.

Too fancy?

I suggest that this photo took a bit of time to get right, and they probably experimented with a few different keys while trying to decide which one looked the most symbolic.  This is my reconstruction of one of the discarded photos.

And here’s another one.

My apologies to Joseph Hoetzl; the key I used in the original version of this last picture (now it’s a different one) was actually a key to a men’s room in the World Trade Center.  To depict it in the hand of a man who was very probably dancing in the streets the day the towers fell seems like sacrilege, since it is exactly the sort of key that would represent the places to which our people can no longer return  thanks to his friends, if any sort of mirror-image demonstration should take place.

It was the first good picture of an ordinary modern key I found under a Yahoo image search for “key”, so I went ahead and did it.

Addendum: I had J. Hoetzl’s formal permission, though I was previously in violation of a Creative Commons license which prohibited derivative works.   I suppose this was sloppy.   My normal modus operandi when playing with photos, whether for personal amusement or for a contest, is to just grab whatever images come off the image search and look good.    Generally speaking, it is considered defensible to do such things provided that the end result is sufficiently altered from the source as to be unrecognizable; I felt it necessary to apologize mainly because after I finished that picture I found the combination inappropriate.  Therefore I have redone the last picture with a different key, for what this silly picture is worth.

In a minor spate of paranoia I altered the notches on the new key, even though I’ve never heard of anybody actually using a photo from the Internet to reproduce a key to let oneself into a tiny suburban house before.  Seems like more effort than it’s worth unless it happens to be a very nice big house loaded with valuables.

Sometimes my humor is so subtle I myself fail to be highly amused.