Conservatives: Faked Photos Bad, Words OK

After reading columns by outraged conservative columnists about the Reuters photograph that was altered one has to believe that conservatives are lucky that the media and public have such short attention spans.

When the enhanced photo was discovered, conservatives went after Reuters. However, to its credit, Reuters ended it's relationship with the photographer, pulled all of his photos to look for other potenital problems, and tightened editing procedures for photographs from the conflict and apologized for the case.

That's a lot more than you can say about many conservative bloggers like Michelle Malkin who had no qualms of using manipulated quotes by Democrats yet screamed about the altered photos. Perhaps she believes what's the big deal over a little faked smoke, sorry, faked words?

Compare conservatives' reaction to the manipulated photo and then look at how they reacted the manipulated Al Gore comments regarding the Internet. Yes, the famous alleged comment that Gore "invented" the Internet. Using that term is about as honest as using the doctored photo, and even worse today since the term has been discredited.

The "quote" came from an interview on CNN where Gore said During my service in the United States Congress, I took the initiative in creating the Internet. As Snopes.com pointed out in discrediting the inventing claim, if President Eisenhower had said he had created the interstate highway system, it's doubtful he would have been ridiculed.

Instead, despite defenses from Vinton Cerf, called by some as a founding father of the Internet, and Republican Newt Gingrich (Gore is not the Father of the Internet, but in all fairness, Gore is the person who, in the Congress, most systematically worked to make sure that we got to an Internet) Eric Boehlert found that during the 2000 election and counted more than 4,800 television, newspaper and magazine mentions during the campaign of Gore supposedly claiming to have invented the Internet.

What conservatives knew is that the media is lazy and would accept the faked term "invented" and so they could easily continue to use it in the future. So the next time you read the words "invented the internet" or "earthtones" (a whole nother story) think about the double standards about why it's wrong to fake photos but ok to fake words.