this is real
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On December 21, 1991, “It’s So Hard to Say Goodbye To Yesterday” hit #2 on the Billboard Hot 100 in the United States. On December 25, 1991, the Soviet Union was dissolved. Coincidence? We think not.
Tonight, spurred by a tweet I was sending along, I took a second look at AP for more details on this 1991 photo, wrongly claimed to be from over the weekend and later debunked as Photoshopped. There were some questions as to why a photo of this nature would be manipulated, and I think I have an answer. I went back to the link I posted yesterday and noticed the AP link was now broken. Weird, I thought — it worked fine yesterday. So then, I did a fresh search and found this photo, which is nearly the same as the one In Focus ran in December. I did a compare and contrast and noticed a red blotch that wasn’t there before. And a different date on the photo — March 19, 1991, not March 10. I compared it with the photo from In Focus, and there was some definite photo manipulation going on — see the bottom four images. However, I can firmly say that the AP photo I downloaded on Sunday did not have this blotch — so The Atlantic is in the clear, this is all AP. The photo that was manipulated appears to have been removed from the archives and replaced with one that hasn’t. In the end, it’s not full deception, but an attempt at cleaning up imperfection. — Ernie @ SFB
This is from March 10, 1991, when a manipulation of this nature would’ve required a lot more work. The clone brush didn’t really exist back then. Could you imagine the level of meticulousness that it would require to edit a photo like this on a really early photo-editing program? Or even by hand? I bugged Alan Taylor about this and he said he’d take a deeper look at the photo, which surfaced as a result of his post from about a month ago.
Our reader squashed threw this in a reply to that fake Russia crowd post, confirming that the picture is in fact Photoshopped:
Looked at the big version of the photo myself and confirmed this using pixel matching. Will send a note to Alan Taylor of the Atlantic about this photo. EDIT: Here’s the original photo on AP.
What people recognize is that there’s a fear that the United States is in an unstoppable decline. They see the rise of China, the rise of India, the rise of the Soviet Union and our loss militarily going forward.Michele Bachmann • In a radio interview. Anyone fearing the rise of the Soviet Union can rest easy, as the country hasn’t existed since its collapse twenty years ago. Bachmann has previously claimed that America’s founding fathers “worked tirelessly” to end slavery, and that the Revolutionary War started in New Hampshire. Are we unfairly picking on a popular candidate for making a few innocent gaffes? Or is Bachmann’s tenuous grasp on history a legitimate concern for a candidate seeking the presidency? source (via • follow)
You misunderstood, man: “Half a century ago, when the Soviets beat us into space with the launch of a satellite called Sputnik¸ we had no idea how we’d beat them to the moon. The science wasn’t there yet. NASA didn’t even exist. But after investing in better research and education, we didn’t just surpass the Soviets; we unleashed a wave of innovation that created new industries and millions of new jobs.” In other words, it was a spark that led to a reinvention of our economy – at least that’s what he was trying to say.
Who needs Photoshop? Not the Soviets. Years before Photoshop became the photo-editing software du jour, they already had some fairly advanced photo-retouching technology. Sure, the tools were a little big and clunky, but clearly they were ultra-effective. If only they had kept at it a little longer; we might all be speaking Russian at the moment. source
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