In his latest excuse for the New York Times’ biased coverage, “public editor” Clark Hoyt casually claims that a Times reporter unmasked a fake Iranian missile photo.

Witty and his colleagues are frustrated because Israel has barred journalists from entering Gaza, and although The Times has two photographers in the region ready to go, it must rely on pictures taken by Palestinian photographers. “When I can’t have my own person there, I have to question every picture that comes in — to an obsessive degree,” he said. Last summer, Witty unmasked as a fake a photo of an Iranian missile test that ran on many other front pages.

Uh, no. We’ve been through this before, and the New York Times did not break this story. We did.

See:
A Memo to Fox News and the New York Times.
Iran’s Photoshopped Missile Launch.

UPDATE at 1/12/09 3:58:05 pm:

A couple of readers forwarded a response:

Thank you for writing and for calling to my attention the claim by the Little Green Footballs blog that it was the first to discover that the photo of the Iranian missile test had been faked.

I inquired further into this matter, and here is what I found: According to Patrick Witty, the photo editor I quoted in Sunday’s public editor column, the photo in question came into the system at The Times at 12:01:29 p.m. on July 9. It was subsequently published on the newspaper’s Web site, and Witty said he planned to use it in the next morning’s printed newspaper. But he said that something struck him as unusual about the picture — it was just too perfect — so he opened it in Photoshop and determined that it was a fake. He said he notified the Web photo editor at about 4 p.m. to take the picture down immediately and then went into the news meeting, in progress, to tell the photo director that the picture was a fraud and shouldn’t be used in the next day’s paper.

Witty said he called AFP at about 6 p.m. to tell them the picture was not genuine, but the wire service refused to send out a correction. The Times published a story about the fake the next morning.

Looking at screen grabs from nytimes.com, my assistant determined that the photo and an accompanying story were posted on the site at 3:13 p.m. on July 9. By 4:31 p.m., the photo was gone. According to the Little Green Footballs site, its story about the fake photo was posted at 6:13:47 PDT on July 9, which would be 9:13 p.m., New York time, or not quite five hours after the photo had been removed from The Times’s site. Witty said he was not aware of the posting by Little Green Footballs, and the time stamps verify his statement.

I’ve encountered a number of these claims before by bloggers. As you know, the Web is a huge universe that is virtually impossible for any single news organization to monitor. Sometimes stories break in more than one place at a time, and one originating site is not aware that information it has published has appeared elsewhere at roughly the same time. In this case, I think it is pretty clear that The Times took corrective action on the photo, based on its own independent analysis, long before Little Green Footballs published its account.

I hope this helps.

Sincerely,

Clark Hoyt
Public Editor
The New York Times

Mr. Hoyt is moving the goalposts. The claim was that LGF broke the story, not that we were the first in the world, chronologically, to notice the fakery. They may have noticed the fraud and removed the photo from their site, but Hoyt himself says the Times didn’t publish about it until the next morning. The original article said Witty had “unmasked” the fake photo, but since LGF was first to publish, that claim is not correct.

Publish or perish. Our point stands.