At this point, the Times is just a pitiful joke

For the record I don't think this farcically obvious fraud shot is politically motivated or symptomatic of Bush Derangement Syndrome or anything like that -- I think the Times photographer just wanted the money shot and figured, "Hey, it's not like my editors will ever notice -- this is the Times, after all, where editorial control and professional standards are, that's right, just like the points on Whose Line Is It Anyway." In other words, I think this is more like the second coming of Jason Blair. UPDATE: Turns out the problem is in the caption the Times ran, not the caption the photographer appears originally to have provided. The photographer appears to have identified the man only as "hurt;" the caption that clearly implies that the fallen guy was a dead body being pulled out of the rubble, came from some nameless NYT editor, not from the photographer. With Tyler Hicks having been duly exonerated, we now focus back on the Times.

The Times is, professionally, just a joke. Just pitiful. It's what a newspaper would be if Bud Selig were its editor-in-chief. They should consider renaming its news sections "Edsel" in order to try to capitalize on association with a product more competently produced than their own.

Really, I'm totally serious -- how is it even remotely possible that the Times's shareholders continue to put up with the current management team? How much more devastation has to be done to the paper's reputation -- and, as a result, its stock price -- before they decide that maybe it might be a good idea to put somebody in charge who was, oh, I don't know...what's the phrase...at least marginally competent?

Hat Tip: Ace (as always, my children are forbidden to follow any links to Ace's blog). Ace, by the way, deserves immense kudos for his prescience. I quote at length, from his post of six days ago:

The American media is setting itself up for a massive scandal. One day, it will in fact come out that they are guilty of willful blindness and a deliberate avoidance of asking their stringers tough questions to maintain their own plausible deniability.

And they'll have to answer some hard questions, such as, "If you're so vigilant against being 'used' by the American government for its 'propaganda,' why are you so blithely nonchalant about being worse-used by America's enemies?"

Many of Steven Glass' colleagues looked back and wondered how they'd been fooled by his fabrications for so long. Apart from the outlandishness of some of his stories, he also had an uncanny knack for getting the Killer Quote that tied together a piece or summed it up in one pithy, bullet-point sentence. We should have known no one gets that lucky so consistently, they said later.

The American media seems to be an employing a possible Army of Steven Glasses, and yet they're more than willing to pretend they don't know what's going on so long as those suspiciously-dramatic front-page pictures keep coming back from the foreign stringers.

Ace also links to Allahpundit who is having a grand time with photos of a car that was "hit by an Israeli missile" that somehow managed not to break the windshield, and the following three pictures that cast some doubt on the good sense of U.S. News and World Report.

We have the original cover.

Then a picture that was taken, in an amazing coincidence, by the same guy who faked the Reuters shots.

Then a closeup of the "fires of war"...

Yes, that's right. The dude is posing, in his best hey-look-at-me-I'm-a-badass-Arab-warrior shtick, in front of a dump full of burning tires. On the cover of U.S. News and World Report. See, the big advantage the professionals have over the blogosphere is all that professional expertise they have and all those professional standards to which they so painstakingly adhere.

Which leads Riehl World to be somewhat unkind:

Hmmmmmmm...the pictures aren't uploading....will try to fix in a minute...