All day long, Americablog has been picking apart a promotional photo from BP showing the alleged BP Deepwater Horizon command center. It turns out that the entire command center seems to have been composed—and composed poorly—in Photoshop.

bpphotoshop2.jpg


In their defense, BP claims that some of the screens were blank and the photographer inserted images onto those screens. This is not a very smart response if they're trying to convince us that the command center is anything but a ruse. Americablog is working to uncover additional fake crisis response photos, too. (Although commenters say it looks like the latter photo might just be a bad job of adjusting the lightness of the photo in post-production rather than out-and-out manipulation.)

This is a minor scandal as far as this whole crisis is concerned but it's emblematic of something larger, I think: BP is too goddamned cheap to even fake this properly—all they'd have to do if they wanted to pull one over on us was hire some actors and build a phony crisis response set. If they can't even be bothered to get this right, their contempt for the American people is probably bottomless.