Dartblog

Josh Marshall, who fancies himself a muckraker, took a stab at debunking this photograph of John Kerry dining by his lonesome at the United States embassy in Iraq. I linked to it a few days ago, taking the opportunity graciously to observe that Kerry is a bad man unworthy of the respect of the men he has condemned as plunderers, murderers, and idiots—which is to say American soldiers.

Marshall and his like made the very silly error of relying on EXIF data to prove their claim. All digital cameras embed a litany of facts about themselves in each and every photograph taken; everything from f-stop to date and time. The trouble is, cameras do not inherently know the date and time. They rely on their owners to input the date and time. Most owners do not know how to do this, but for those that do, there is the constant peril of removing the batteries from the camera, which causes the date and time revert to default—midnight on the first of January.

When Marshall and company saw that the EXIF data contained the date 1/9/06 as the “taken-on” date for the photograph, which Scott Hennen’s correspondent claimed was snapped on Christmas morning, their saliva glands threw to pulsing wrests, and they took to the Internet to reveal the vile and the deceit of conservative bloggers. Merrily, the Internet does its job well, and we now know that the photograph was real and accurate. (It has been decided that the right side of the blogosphere believes that realness is prerequisite to accuracy, while the left does not. But this is a long story.)

How do we know there is no compelling reason to distrust Hennen’s well-placed Baghdad correspondent? For one thing, the camera model used—a Vivitar Vivicam 8400—did not come out until after January. For another, the fact that press photographers snapped other pictures during that same Kerry Christmas visit, showing him wearing the same clothes. And for many, many others, see Michelle Malkin.