Jophiel wrote:
That's (one of) the funniest parts of Gbaji & Varus's conspiracy theory. We're supposed to believe that the administration was scrambling to regain public confidence or something after this but the only places you might hear of it are conservative pseudo-news sites and the "Comments" sections of regular news stories where the crazies all hang out.
Which is exactly why they got ahead of the story with the BS bit about changing the policy regarding staged photos after speeches. That story is designed to mask this one. Now, when someone mentions a staged photo, everyone will think of the speech photos and not think it's a big deal.
A lot of big stories start as small ones on the fringe sites and comments Joph. Of course, a lot of BS is there too, but that doesn't automatically mean anything. Edward's love child was ignored by the main stream media (downplayed some might say) until after it didn't affect the Dems politically. Reverend Wright was blatantly ignored by the mainstream media for 6-8 months, existing only on fringe sites as well. Even after youtube videos surfaced it still took about 2-3 months for the mainstream media to cover the story. It was only until it was simply impossible to ignore it anymore that they covered it.
So I'm not so confident in the whole "If channel 9 news isn't covering it, it must not be true!" position. In this case, it's not even a matter of speculation. We know that the photo was handed out by the white house to the media. We know that the media overwhelmingly reported said photo as showing them reacting directly to events occurring during the operation itself. We now know that they were blacked out during the operation itself, so at best they were sitting there waiting for news after the fact. The only real question is to what degree the incorrect captions and stories were the media embellishing on their own (and I'm fully aware that they do this), and how much of it came from the white house itself.