By Steve Safran, Editor, Lost Remote

It took an astute blogger to notice, but it turns out BP Photoshopped a picture of what it says is its crisis control center. The company added pictures of video to screens that were actually blank, and left plenty of clues. I urge you to go to americablog.com to see all the evidence, but here's just one example, to the right.

Note the obvious crop marks around the top of the man's head. The added screens have similarly indisputable clues. Not only did the company do a lousy job of Photoshopping - anyone with an elementary knowledge of the software could have done better - but it also seems unapologetic. The Washington Post picked up on the story and got this quote from BP:

"Normally we only use Photoshop for the typical purposes of color correction and cropping," (BP Spokesman Scott) Dean said 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."

Does that sound remorseful to you? BP has since replaced the doctored photo with (what it claims to be) the original. But an americablog reader noticed something else about the picture: each digital photo has metadata, information about the picture, "hidden" within the file. And the reader noticed that the date the picture was taken was in 2001. This could be the fault of the photographer failing to set the date properly in his camera, but BP's shenanigans have to leave you wondering.

Now, you probably didn't run the doctored photo. But there is a lesson to be learned here and it is simple: do not accept handouts from companies. I know that some reporting, especially business reporting, uses B-Roll provided by companies. And the stations are usually good at labeling the video as a "handout." Nonetheless, we have no way of knowing if what we're seeing is representative of the actual environment. And while we comfort ourselves with disclaimers, the audience certainly doesn't distinguish between station-shot imagery and handout imagery.

This is tough advice to take, especially in the video realm. But think of how embarrassed you'd be today if you had run that doctored BP photo, disclaimer or not.