The Onion’s deadpan photography plays second funny fiddle to its stories, and therein lies a tiny problem that emerged this week: The words are completely made up, but the pictures are very real.

This week, one of fake newspaper’s earnest-looking everymen of 2006 (see: “Hero Firefighter Loses Lifelong Battle With Fire“) turned out to have a name and a problem. From the CBC’s interview with Rudy Lindia, Ottawa firefighter:

“My 82-year-old mother wasn’t very, very impressed when she saw it — that her son, who’s alive and well in her living room, is on some website, dead,” said Lindia, whose colleagues now sometimes jokingly refer to him as “dead man talking, dead man walking.”

For using his image without asking permission, Mr. Lindia said earlier this week that The Onion should apologize. And the satirical newspaper responded quite seriously today, according The Ottawa Citizen:

“We feel really crummy about it and we apologize to the firefighter in question,” said Chet Clem, a spokesman for the website. “But at the same time, we subscribe to a number of photo services and we have to trust that the images we buy from these photo sites are properly licensed.”

Mr. Clem has a point, no matter how displeased Mr. Lindia may be. In 2002, Mr. Lindia posed for a photographer visiting his firehouse, signing a waiver in the process. The images eventually landed at a stock photography Web site, where anyone can have them for a price.

Privacy concerns aside, the dispute may have answered a question that never needed to be asked. As one blogger wrote in the opening line of a post on the subject, “Ever wonder where some of those Onion pictures come from?”

Like Santa, the truth about these Onion regulars was meant to be hidden. Here’s to hoping that they don’t start complaining, too.

[Via Fark]