Both the Daily Mail and the Daily Mirror today – among with several others in the US (including the New York Post, which credits the image to AP) and other countries – published an image purporting to be that of the dead Osama Bin Laden.
It clearly wasn’t.
Any journalist with a drop of cynicism would have questioned the source of the images – even if they did appear on Pakistan television.
It certainly passed the ‘Too good to be true’ test.
Instead, it was users of Reddit and Twitter who first highlighted the dodgy provenance of the image, and the image it was probably based on. Knight News and MSNBC’s Photo blog‘s followed soon after.
It took me all of 10 seconds to verify that it is a fake – by using TinEye to find other instances of the image, I found this example from last April.
But instead of owning up that their image was a fake, both The Daily Mail and Mirror appear to have simply removed the image from their site, leaving that image to circulate amongst their users. Ego, pure and simple.
PS: More on verifying images and other hoax material here.