BP gets caught with manipulated photo

Oil company BP is under fire again. This time it isn’t about the containment of the oil leak but about a picture. The company had posted a picture of their control room on the website and a blog found out the picture was digitally manipulated. Two screens that were empty on the original picture were filled in to show remote robots at work to plug the leak. This is what the Washington Post had to say about it:

John Aravosis pointed out the alterations Monday evening on his Americablog.comand observed, “I guess if you’re doing fake crisis response, you might as well fake a photo of the crisis response center.” The photo doctoring comes as BP has promised transparency in a bid to regain the public’s trust.

BP subsequently removed the picture and replaced it with an image that shows the empty screens. The company has since blamed a photographer and called it an innocent mistakes. Commentors on blogs have been more critical. One said that if they can’t even get screens to work in their control room how could they be expected to stop the leak. The quality of the Photoshop job has also come under fire as you can clearly see mistakes and sloppiness.

Here’s the original story on the America blog. You can find the manipulated shot there, including some of the ‘finer’ details. Yahoo news picked up the story as well.