BP Caught Photoshopping Disaster Response Photos 560
An anonymous reader tipped a post up on Americablog revealing that BP Photoshopped a fake photo of their crisis command center and posted it on their main site. The blogger commented, "I guess if you're doing fake crisis response, you might as well fake a photo of the crisis response center." While this story was just being picked up by the Washington Post, an Americablog reader spotted another doctored BP photo on their website, this time of a "top kill" working group. How many others?
Who cares (Score:3, Insightful)
http://www.bp.com/sectionbodycopy.do?categoryId=9034366&contentId=7063636
So the story is... (Score:5, Insightful)
"BP Removes reflection of camera flash from meaningless publicity photo! UPDATE: Twice!"
OMG!!!! NOES11111 (Score:5, Insightful)
If you have to find fault with BP, find fault with things they really messed up, of which there are many, but not a photo retouched for aesthetic reasons.
More BP news... (Score:5, Insightful)
Make sure you shake them down real good. Know you, bankrupt them or something. Just don't come crying to me when you wake up and realise a good 38 or 39% of BP is US owned, despite the apparent 'anti British feeling' this whole thing is riding upon. As far as the media are concerned, it's fighting the redcoats all over again... except in actuality, you're shooting yourself
Re:Who cares (Score:2, Insightful)
This is just an attempt to get more hits on that shitty blog. These images are just filler material for purely aesthetic purposes, it's not like BP submitted these in court to prove that they were trying their bestest to stem the leak.
Re:OMG!!!! NOES11111 (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Who cares (Score:2, Insightful)
Just because it has a low profile doesn't make it any less an instance of disinformation.
It deserves to be uncovered on a blog, but probably isn't Slashdot-worthy.
Re:Who cares?? Well, I care! (Score:3, Insightful)
This is just an attempt to get more hits on that shitty blog. These images are just filler material for purely aesthetic purposes, it's not like BP submitted these in court to prove that they were trying their bestest to stem the leak.
So, as long as it's not in court, a company can tell lies... because most stories they tell about their products and business model are in the media basically for aesthetic purposes.
In fact, commercials too are all about aesthetics.
The point is that BP have done an awful lot of things for "aesthetic purposes" lately. Like changing a few numbers (flow of oil) in the media. Like predicting when it'd all be solved. Like saying that oil isn't dangerous.
It's easy to do "aesthetics" if you have billions of profit to keep the logo looking green.
Re:So the story is... (Score:4, Insightful)
What kind of flash reflection removal leaves polygonal white outline around someone's head?
Have one look at the analysis. This is not "this photo has been processed through photoshop before publication". This is a blatant failure of combining various photos into one picture and trying to make them look good. I bet screens full of tables, log displays and emails were deemed not attractive enough and got replaced with colorful photos of most photogenic locations of the disaster.
Re:Who cares (Score:4, Insightful)
it's not like BP submitted these in court to prove that they were trying their bestest to stem the leak.
It's called the court of Public Opinion and it's unforgiving.
Re:Who cares?? Well, I care! (Score:5, Insightful)
So, as long as it's not in court, a company can tell lies... because most stories they tell about their products and business model are in the media basically for aesthetic purposes.
Ever seen a woman wear makeup...?
Re:The Story here... (Score:5, Insightful)
The Canon EOS 1Ds Mark III is from around 2007 (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canon_EOS-1Ds_Mark_III [wikipedia.org]). So if this info is correct then 2001-03-06 is wrong.
Humanity cares (Score:5, Insightful)
That being said, I agree there's a boundary where nobody cares anymore whether it's real or not - e.g. if a cover girl's photo is severely doctored to conform to the beauty standard of the times. Why? Because it's bubblegum pop news.
BP on the other hand is not only front page news, it's currently the antagonist in what will be recorded as one of the worst environmental disasters of the 21st century. History will forget that People Magazine's cover of Britney Spears makes it look like she's a D cup instead of a B cup*, but it won't forget that BP downgraded the seriousness of the situation at every available opportunity.
*This is a purely fictional example...I have no idea of what magazines splashed Britney Spears' cleavage all over their front page, and what her actual vs depicted dimensions are...all I care is that she appears to be popping out of any garment they squeeze her into.
The meaning of PR (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:More BP news... (Score:5, Insightful)
Absolutely! The oil spill is bad enough, and there's no point pretending otherwise, but I find the anti-British sentiment that accompanies it unbelievably distasteful. As we say in football (soccer), play the ball, not the man! Deal with the issues, of course. It doesn't matter who owns BP; they and the company should be held to account without regard to their nationality.
Re:More BP news... (Score:1, Insightful)
I don't give a fuck if they are British-owned or not, and neither does anyone else, except for you and the other astroturfers
Re:Humanity cares (Score:5, Insightful)
it's currently the antagonist in what will be recorded as one of the worst environmental disasters of the 21st century.
There's an awful lot of 21st Century left yet, not sure I'd make that statement quite yet.
Re:OMG!!!! NOES11111 (Score:2, Insightful)
Is it significant to the ongoing story of the crisis and the response, that at the particular moment the photo was taken, 3 screens out of 10 in a bank did not have video on them?
No.
It was changed for aesthetic purposes. Probably a silly thing to do, but hardly a scandal.
Re:And this is a story why? (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:And this is a story why? (Score:3, Insightful)
Interesting word "somehow" you chose there. How indeed does looking at a bank of 10 screens make one "busier" than looking at a bank of 8 screens.
Another interesting choice was the phrase "according to you", when neither the person you are replying to, nor BP made any claim of the photo representing "busy".
So what the fuck do you think you are talking about?
Re:What's the fuss (Score:4, Insightful)
Lanham Act places bounds on "puffery" (Score:1, Insightful)
So, as long as it's not in court, a company can tell lies... because most stories they tell about their products and business model are in the media basically for aesthetic purposes.
"Puffery" (lies a company tells in the media about their products) can, in fact, cross the slippery slope and be illegal under the Lanham Act. http://www.ca5.uscourts.gov/opinions/pub/00/00-10071.cv0.wpd.pdf [uscourts.gov]
Re:Oh BP, for shame (Score:1, Insightful)
The important thing here is the implication of them lying about the irrelevant details, namely that they can very well also be lying about the important things.
Causing such a disaster in the first place is bad. I hope you understand how lying about their efforts to fix it can be worse.
Re:Who cares (Score:3, Insightful)
In the case of reuters and other serious news companies photoshopped images generally lead 1 or more people getting canned.
This sort of thing- companies releasing images to simply mislead the public is far far far more common.
I've seen some odd ones like a coal company releasing photoshopped images of coal faces.(clone tool to make it look like there was more coal than there really was)
Police have been caught photoshoping images subtly for court proceedings.
But the worst offenders seem to be governments. Be it cutting out unpoplar people from a publicity shoot, changing history or enlarging a crowd photoshop is the politicians greatest friend.
Re:Quality of work... (Score:3, Insightful)
Costs too much.
Photoediting (Score:4, Insightful)
I really wish people would stop using the term "Photoshopping". There are dozens of programs that can edit photos in such ways. I mean, we don't call it "Gimping", for example.
I suggest the term "photoediting".... or even just "editing"...
"BP Caught Photoediting Disaster Response Photos"
"BP Caught Editing Disaster Response Photos"
I know, "good luck with that"
Re:OMG!!!! NOES11111 (Score:3, Insightful)
A photography that is produced, shown and marketed for aesthetics is one thing. It's goal is to look cool. Just like an entertaining movie.
A photography that is documenting reality, that is meant to inform and educate has a goal of being accurate. Like news reporting.
A photography that is pretending to document reality while aiming at looking cool is what tabloids are, disreputable shit.
Re:Who cares (Score:4, Insightful)
Actually, I'm pretty sure they work for the Illuminati. I'm pretty sure a corporation like BP wouldn't allow lowly masons amongst it's ranks. Their reptilian overlords would shit a brick.
Re:Who cares?? Well, I care! (Score:5, Insightful)
So, as long as it's not in court, a company can tell lies... because most stories they tell about their products and business model are in the media basically for aesthetic purposes.
In fact, commercials too are all about aesthetics.
The point is that BP have done an awful lot of things for "aesthetic purposes" lately. Like changing a few numbers (flow of oil) in the media. Like predicting when it'd all be solved. Like saying that oil isn't dangerous.
It's easy to do "aesthetics" if you have billions of profit to keep the logo looking green.
How the hell is this modded insightful?
a) They didn't give the flow number, that was your very own coast guard that gave the wildly wrong estimate.
b) From the very beginning they started drilling relief wells, from the very beginning they said it would be mid august before they are ready, from the very beginning they said this will be the final solution and they will simply attempt all sorts of other methods of stopping the flow in the meantime.
c) {citation needed} and not just some shitty blog either, every single press release from BP is available in full on their website. Show me where BP has officially said oil isn't that dangerous.
Call it what it is, It's marketing. Everyone does it. I'm more disgusted that Microsoft photoshopped out black guy on their polish website. These pictures are just another crap job rather than some stupid conspiracy.
Re:Who cares (You Should) (Score:0, Insightful)
"They are keeping legitimate news organizations away from key locations by pretending that it will interfere with the cleanup."
It depends upon the location whether this is truly weasely or not. For example, some people have requested permission to fly over the wellsite, steam through it on ships, or even deploy their own ROVs in the area, all of which are unsafe and unreasonable requests given the equipment (dozens of ships), flaring, and tons of flammable oil floating on the surface. It's a fricking technical circus they're coordinating out there, and I'd be telling news crews or other people in their boats to stay the hell away, not for any nefarious reasons. If people just want to see the guys scraping tar balls off the beach, that's different.
"Right after the explosion, they make rig workers sign papers saying they had no injuries BEFORE THEY LET THEM GET ON SHORE."
That initially sounds sinister, but after thinking about it, it seems reasonable to me. It's simple: either declare that you have injuries now (in which case a doctor will treat them), or sign a paper saying you don't have any. They were probably trying to avoid a situation like someone suing them 6 weeks later for "whiplash" or some other injury that would be hard to disprove after the fact. "Are you injured or not?" is a reasonable question to ask, and to get legal documentation of, before someone leaves a workplace where an accident has happened.
Photoshopping some content into otherwise blank ROV screen feeds is trival. I don't see any reason to get worked up about it if they were trying to make the picture look prettier. It's not like they were falsifying key data or something. It's a PR picture -- big deal!
Note that I haven't defended BP on the other things you've listed.
Re:Humanity cares (Score:5, Insightful)
The 21st Century is less than 10 years old , but Century sounds worse than Decade aesthetically
I suspect that Oil wells burning in Kuwait, or the small matter of the Chernobyl disaster might have been worse environmental disasters, but they are so last century, and did not affect the USA so they don't count ....
Re:Who cares?? Well, I care! (Score:3, Insightful)
So, as long as it's not in court, a company can tell lies
That's why we here on Slashdot are so confident about Microsoft's pledge to not sue Linux users for $INSERT_RANDOM_PATENT. Because, like BP, they have so much money that they don't need to lie.
Seriously, if that's a question then the answer is a resounding, "yes!" Why would you believe anything a multi-billion dollar company would tell you? The only time you can actually buy what they're saying is when there are some legal repercussions for not telling the truth.
It's not that giant companies are pure evil (unless you're Apple, Inc., then yes you are pure evil) it's just that they get so big that they have serious left-hand-not-knowing-what-right-hand-is-doing-itis. Which in turn falls back to filthy rich CEOs doing an incredibility shitty job at keeping people accountable for their actions. In the end thought it's really because we buy this isolation pile that heads of company's (hell even the heads of most Government's now) tend to use when crap hits the fan. You're in charge, all hell is breaking loose on your watch, you took a risk (directly or indirectly) and it turned out to be the undoing of all life in the Gulf of Mexico; now the only thing that should be going through your mind is how to leave your job in the best of light, after you are done with the relief well.
I'm so tired of this, it's complicated and your little brain cannot understand it or it's an isolated event that will never happen again crap that we've been getting since 2008. At least here in the United States the last president was genuinely too stupid to relay the information to us.
Sorry this rant could go on for a while... I'll just head over here and mumble in the corner.
Imagine if it had been a US corporation shitting (Score:1, Insightful)
Imagine if it had been a US corporation shitting. Would there have been the outcry? Well, in the past this was not true. US corporation Exxon. 21 years later, still hasn't paid the money they said they would. Outrage: nil
The point is that it SHOULDN'T matter who owns the corporation. The PROBLEM is that it does. That the UK majority corporation gets villified when the US majority corporation doesn't is proof of this effect, so, please, DO NOT claim "it doesn't matter who owns it" unless you prove it doesn't matter by your actions in other cases of corporations shitting in your backyard.
Also note that BP in the UK and NW Europe puts dual failsafes like the US is now saying should have been used here. This is because in the UK and Scandanavia, the governments there INSIST these failsafes are there. The US government DOESN'T. As so many Fre Marketeers insist, the corporation has a duty to maximise shareholder value. If the safety isn't required, it won't be applied. Just go and see if other drilling platforms use the safeties that are now being cried about in the US.
Re:Who cares (Score:4, Insightful)
The court of public opinion is downright foolish. We're all pissed about the oil spill after we chanted "drill, baby, drill" and keep driving around in our SUVs with no passengers.
Re:Humanity cares (Score:2, Insightful)
I'd argue the exact opposite. Humanity in general seems to love liars and being lied to. They idolize those who present a rosy picture of the world. Even worse, humans have a tendency to villainise those who point out the lies and hypocrisy in what they're being told.
Re:So the story is... (Score:3, Insightful)
Well, I think you've just illustrated beyond a doubt why they did what they did. A couple of screens are blank for reasons we don't even know and your immediate response is "ROAR I WANT PHDS TO MONITOR VIDEO SCREENS 24/7~~!!one!" Come on now. You don't even need PhD's in that room much less be bitching about whether or not a particular video stream is up at any given time.
Is it a bad picture? Yeah. So what? It's simply hatred of BP for what happened that makes you think it's a big deal, because it's absolutely not. The idea that a poor Photoshop job somehow means they're a terrible company who doesn't know what it's doing is laughably absurd.
Now if you want to talk about them being greedy bastards who very probably ignored safety concerns for the chance at slightly increased profits, or that this needs to cost them so much they don't want to go on living, I'm all on board.
Re:Who cares (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah... unless you can back that one up, I'm going to have to call bullshit on that.
Re:Who cares?? Well, I care! (Score:5, Insightful)
More importantly, ever wake up next to her the next morning and seen the reality of the same face without makeup?
Yes, and it's been my experience that no amount of makeup will make an ugly woman look good. Ever notice how morbidly obese women wear tons of makeup as if it will cover up the fact that they're fat?
Makeup will nake a good looking woman look better, and then only if it's applied right. Makeup won't help an ugly chick at all.
Now, your being drunk will make an ugly woman look good, that's when you wake up sober the next morning and say "OMFG!!!!!! WHAT HAVE I GOTTEN MYSELF INTO?!?" But that's your bad, not hers.
Re:Who cares (Score:4, Insightful)
The court of public opinion has decided that oil = bad
Which may not be such a bad thing, in a sense. The world really, seriously needs to get off its oil-addiction, and I don't think people will be willing to give up the convenience of cheap energy unless it somehow becomes a massively uncool things to use oil in the public imagination.
Yes, I am fully aware that this is not "fair" - since when has that mattered? Fairness has never been the watch word in the world of business before, so why should it be now?
Re:Speaking as a Brit... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Who cares?? Well, I care! (Score:5, Insightful)
I've seen my share of women whose makeup makes them look worse than they would without it.
Though I know there are no girls on Slashdot, here's a tip: if I can tell you're wearing makeup, you have already failed. Proper makeup application enhances beauty, it doesn't attempt to replace it.
Re:Speaking as a Brit... (Score:3, Insightful)
But why so little mention of Halliburton (= big American corporation) who were actually responsible for the drilling site?
Because BP is responsible for the drilling site. The outsourced it to TransOcean, who hired Haliburton, who probably rented the equipment that installed the part that was made by a supplier in China.
You can drill down to who was responsible for certain portions of this operation, but when the oil bubbles up, it belongs to BP.
Who Cares? (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah. Who cares indeed. Let's invest our attention on finding a new reason to hate Apple instead - they are the new, cool target-of-hate, after all.
Seriously, when I watch people come up with bullshit reasons to heap hatred upon a tech company at the same time that an oil company gets a free ride when caught outright deceiving the public, I'm left wondering what the hell is wrong with people.
Mod me troll. Feel free. After all, who cares.
Re:Unless.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Thanks for linking a perfect example. She looks decent without makeup. With it, she looks completely fake. It's not subtle at all.
Re:Who cares?? Well, I care! (Score:3, Insightful)
I find in extraordinary that anybody could consider corporations lying as routine aesthetics. Why would any consider the individuals hiding behind the façade of a corporation have gained the moral right to lie to every person outside of the corporation.
Substantive misrepresentation of company or product capabilities for one can 'illegally' alter the public's perception of the value of the company and artificially inflate it's share price. It is the responsibility of the regulatory to investigated artificial inflation of the company share prices especially when insiders start selling stock.
Most countries have consumer protection agencies and in the event of sufficient registered consumer complaints they will investigate and if appropriate prosecute (don't forget to make formal complaints they count). Truth in advertising, it was tackled before by people in the fifties and sixties and it is pretty bloody obvious not enough was done. It is time that truth in advertising became a major political issue again so that it can be further tightened up, especially advertising as news B$ (lies for profit).
The big thing about this story, lamed arsed British Petroleum, is too slack and stupid not to do a better job of it web PR=B$ efforts, it seems pretty obvious it needs to let go of it's current antiquated amateurish staff and replace them with some quality amoral professionals. There a many major corporations who all recognise the power and the danger of the internet, yet time and time again they show some real noob like efforts, you can't help but imagine all those BP marketdroids sitting in a office together nodding and agreeing with each others brilliance, wiping white powder off their noses as they launch yet another ill fated marketing stunt.
Re:Who cares (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Who cares?? Well, I care! (Score:4, Insightful)
Yes, and it's been my experience that no amount of makeup will make an ugly woman look good. Ever notice how morbidly obese women wear tons of makeup as if it will cover up the fact that they're fat?
I'll go you one better. I just got back from my 20th high school reunion. The girls who were nice and fun to be around in high school were - without exception - attractive and young-looking. Some had, um, eaten well, but they were still pretty and had contagious smiles.
The girls who were spiteful and snotty in high school were - without exception - unattractive and worn. Some had nice figures but their faces where creased with scowl lines and crows feet.
Lesson learned: "good personality" is a much better makeup than anything you can buy in a store. It lasts a lot longer.
Re:Who cares?? Well, I care! (Score:1, Insightful)
It was an ACCIDENT! Get over it.
I, for one, am more than willing to accept that this catastrophe was completely unintentional! What I am unable to just "get over" is the apparently willful negligence of all three companies before it happened that made the spill more probable, as well as BP's ineptitude in resolving the situation quickly and effectively. IMHO, this type of "little white lie" dishonesty is just adding an annoying insult to a very large injury.
Re:Who cares (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:What a ridiculous story (Score:3, Insightful)
BP is just the liberals' whipping boy right now. They are riding it as hard as they can to drive hits to their worthless whiny blogs.
Oh yes, THAT'S all this is about.
You're clearly not quite used to having a full brain to work with, but don't fret. You'll figure it out eventually, but until you do, try to slow down. Telling the difference between those M's and W's [latimes.com] can be really tough on the newbies.
http://www.slate.com/id/2173965 [slate.com]
http://www.nature.com/neuro/journal/v10/n10/abs/nn1979.html [nature.com]
-FL