And while we're talking about the bullet lady, I just thought of something: remember in the first picture how she was holding the round in such a way that she might have very well been concealing the brass casing with the palm of her hand? Could all of these pictures have been deliberately faked for political reasons, or maybe just for the sensationalism required to sell newspapers; wartime tragedy or shameless prevarication? Maybe. But even if we knew for sure, yes or no, would that change anyone's mind either way? Would it really make any difference, other than for the brief satisfaction of the "AHA!" moment? I don't think so.

The "bullet lady" is a symptom of a larger issue, the manufacture of phony news on the part of enemy sympathizers in Iraq, usually some Iraqis and a few local stringers only loosely associated with major media groups. The media falls down on this not because they deliberately created the phony news, but because they are so eager to accept it uncritically.

Dan Rather's failure was not that he committed fraud, but that he so easily allowed fraud to be committed on him.

Again, each example of this "fake news" deal is not important on its own, but this has been happening way too often. It isn't harmless, either. Fake news on things like Mohammed cartoons, abuses of prisoners, burnt mosques, and other serious accusations, have resulted in deaths.

I documented other examples of this in other posts, including extensive occurences in the recent Lebanese war and particularly the Israel-Palestine conflict, but what is particularly frustrating here is that any attempt to bring something into a larger context seems to run into the "tabula rasa" syndrome, where I have to go back each and every time and rebuild the damn foundation. This recent picture was supposed to be a painfully obvious topper on an extensive media behavior pattern, but most people treated it as though it was the first time the subject had been brought up.