Monday, August 06, 2007

"Fake but accurate" legacy continues in the Reality-Based Community (Updated)

The lefty blog "Shakespeare's Sister" includes this photo along with a story intended to portray George W. Bush as a (violent) bully.

Bush did play Rugby at Harvard, and the photo looks real. But what about the caption?


clipped from www.snopes.com
George W. Bush


Snopes.com vouches for the legitimacy of the photo, and tracks the top photo to a 1969 yearbook. And if the photo appeared in a yearbook, then it wouldn't be too surprising to see a caption loaded with editorial content, much less a caption plainly intended as a joke.

As Snopes.com noted:
We don't know for sure which of these captions is genuine and which might have been the product of digital manipulation. The use of the term "Thursday's contest" in the second photo's caption implies the picture was taken from a school newspaper, so it's possible the same photo might also have been used in a yearbook with a different caption and thus both are genuine.
(Snopes.com)


Update: After the "fake but accurate" CBS documents fiasco, I can't believe I missed this. Take a look at the caption on the top photo. The text is fully justified, meaning that either typesetting or a program has elongated the spaces between the words to fill out the entire space from one edge of the photo to the other. The "G" from "George" aligns with the left margin and the "t" in "right" aligns with the right margin. The space between each word is equal. The sans serif type is another interesting feature. If the font can be identified, I wonder if a common modern program can exactly mimic the caption?

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