News of a plane crash: of fake photos and the net..

Truly, while a lot of people including Thomas Friedman talk of the internet as a flattener, making the world a flat place where there is no First World and a Third World (well, that is a very contentious topic, since as long as there is civilization and humanity, I believe there would always be inequality. Some would always claim to be Ubermenschen and some would always be treated as subhumans), its very difficult to accept anything the net dishes out as truth. Again, there are forces and anti-forces at work to ensure no one gets to know what the real picture is - perhaps there are low profile sites that are struggling to keep themselves clean - but its really difficult. The other day, I received a chain mail on an Iranian kid being punished with amputation of his limbs for stealing something petty (very Oliver Twistian tale)...and on googling I found many sites debating on humanitarian grounds around those pictures. And then some sites unfolded the fraud - that the pictures propagated were actually just a few snapshots of a series of pictures covering a street act in Iran (or perhaps some other mid-eastern nation) and that the kid is actually a street actor...Then the latest pictures purportedly showing the last minutes of the ill-fated Air France 447 crash from the inside, taken by an intrepid photographer (turned out they were snapshots of an episode of the drama "Lost"). An LA Times front cover some time back had an Iraq photo that turned out to be fake later (the paper fired the photographer, perhaps because he was caught)..so, how much of genuine stuff are we really getting? A newspaper atleast retracts from an earlier publishing if people start questioning the content and tries to ensure it gets its facts "correct"...

These days, whenever I receive a mail with some weird looking photos, the first thing I do is google up the key words in the mail and the word "fake". Not surprisingly, I get a full page of Google results.