Right-Wing Bloggers' Fake Sgrena Car Photo -with help from AP

[BreakForNews]

Right-Wing Bloggers' Fake
Sgrena Car Photo

AP Linked to Disinfo on Shooting

by Fintan Dunne, Editor
BreakForNews.com March 6th, 2005
http://wagnews.blogspot.com/2005/03/right-wing-bloggers-fake-sgrena-car.html

Right-wing bloggers are circulating a photo purportedly showing the car in which Sgrena Guiliani was wounded and her rescuer Nicola Calipari was fatally shot. The photo is being used to discredit Sgrena's account of the shooting.

It shows a four-door sedan which has only the driver's side window broken and no overt bullet damage to the bodywork. That contradicts the "hail of bullets" described by Sgrena and others. And it boosts the US military's case that the incident was just a "mishap."



At first glance the picture seems legitimate. Captions which accompany the photo on blogs say it's a still frame taken from an Associated Press video about the shooting at Baghdad Airport......

They make comments like:

"I ask you, does the car above look like it was “riddled with bullets? Either our soldiers are terrible shots or some people are being pretty loose with the facts in this story." (source)

But if you are suspicious that the car seems far too little damaged, you might -as I did- check major search engines for such a high-profile photo. On the second page of a Yahoo News Photo search -I quickly found the same vehicle photographed from another angle. This time with an Iraqi man standing beside the vehicle.

Tracking back the "car photo" story through blogs --which credited each other as the tale passed around, the feeding chain included thepoliticalteen.net, sayanythingblog.com, and the source of it all littlegreenfootballs.com.....

Here, even as the story continued to ooze across the blogsphere, the source of it all had already retracted their claim it was Sgrena's car.

And they were blaming Associated Press for it all, because in the AP video, the car clip from the February 5th, kidnapping was misleading synchronized with the voice-over describing the Baghdad airport shooting of Sgrena:

Full Story: http://wagnews.blogspot.com/2005/03/right-wing-bloggers-fake-sgrena-car.html