BP’s public image problems took a turn for the weirder on Monday, with AMERICAblog’s John Aravosis exposing a poorly doctored photo of the company’s crisis command center in Houston that had been posted to the official crisis response website. The company has now come clean (sort of) to The Washington Post — claiming this morning that it was the photographer who snapped the image who was responsible for inserting three extra video screens into a bank of monitors. It still remains unclear, though, precisely why the alterations were even made in the first place.
Check out the differences for yourself. First up, the Photoshopped image as it originally appeared on BP’s website:
Next, the updated image posted last night, purportedly unaltered, which shows three blank ROV screens in place of the underwater images that had been pasted into the original photo.
“Normally, we only use Photoshop for the typical purposes of color correction and cropping,” BP spokesman Scott Dean told the Post in an e-mail. “In this case, they copied and pasted three ROV screen images in the original photo over three screens that were not running video feeds at the time.”
BP’s remote-operated vehicles (ROVs), or robot submarines, have played crucial roles in the response to the gulf oil spill crisis since it began, sending back video and still images of the scene around the well and operating the various proposed mechanical solutions for containing the leak a mile below the surface, where no human divers can work.
However, BP has been criticized for suppressing damning underwater video footage from the public — specifically, footage that showed much more serious leaks than the company was admitting to during the days immediately following the Deepwater Horizon platform explosion on April 20.
In this case, the company, or someone employed by it, seems to have made the opposite error — supplying extra views where there were none. Why would BP or the photographer do so? Bloggers have proposed several theories.
1. The Photo Was Too Old
As one of AMERICABlog’s readers pointed out, “The photo contains data suggesting it was taken in 2001, not July of 2010 as claimed on BP’s website. That would suggest at least one possibility is that BP took an old photo and Photoshopped new pictures of the oil spill over it, to make it look ‘new.'” The company has not addressed this speculation, and the meta data for the updated photo contains a time stamp from July 16.
2. BP Feared the Blogosphere
Gawker’s Max Read wonders if BP was hoping to avoid further public criticism for posting a photo showing blank video screens. “Were they so afraid of the withering comments of bloggers noticing three blank screens that they thought they should paste in three duplicate images?” If so, the mission failed.
3. BP Just Doesn’t Care
EnergyBoom’s Nathanael Baker offers one of the most cynical interpretations yet, saying that the faked photo is just further evidence of the company’s unrepentant audacity. “With all the public scrutiny surrounding BP, it is absolutely amazing that the company not only continues to make such poor public relations decisions, but also continues to offer misinformation to the world.”
4. BP Responds: Combination of Good Intentions Gone Bad, Technical Glitches
UPDATED: BP spokesperson Scott Dean told Surge Desk that the photo was altered in post-production by the photographer and a team of editors, to make the scene “more panoramic,” but that it was a mistake and that the company has not and will not be doing any similar adjustments.
When asked if there are other photos currently on the website that have undergone similar Photoshop treatments, Dean said that “some have undergone color-correction and cropping, but that’s generally the extent. We’re currently looking through and reviewing all of the other photos to make sure nothing like this has happened anywhere else. It’s certainly not a routine practice.”
As for the 2001 time stamp noted above, Dean offered the following explanation: “The photographer we hired has been working very hard and taking thousands of pictures of the course of the spill. During that time, camera equipment was damaged by salt water and new equipment had to be rented. As a result of this incident, we contacted the photographer and discovered that the rented equipment had put the 2001 timestamp on the photos.”
I never believed those live feeds after May 28th….look at the gusher
they were showing the 28th and 29th of May.. It isn’t the crimped end of
the risor nor the end that was laying horizonally on the seabed
Then the June 30th Skandi ROV II camera shot between 1730 and 1740
they accidentally show for one second while adjusting the camera the top
of the plate, I know what I saw, or really what I didn’t see ….
So they videos were all manufactured in my belief after the top kill mud shot
failure.