This week it came to light that BP had photoshopped—poorly—an official image of their crisis command center. Apparently, that wasn't an isolated incident. Let's take a closer look at this view from a helicopter, shall we? UPDATED:


The photo, sent in by a tipster and entitled "View of the MC 252 site from the cockpit of a PHI S-92 helicopter 26 June 2010," shows up here, a section of BP's website that hopes to explain their response effort through pictures. This one, sadly, is fabricated.

The first thing you might notice out of place is the looming air traffic control tower in the upper left hand side of the photo:




Then, direct your attention to where the water abruptly changes shades of blue in a frenzy of pixelation, blurring, and a disappearing vessel:



Zeroing in on the pilot on the left, evidence of a pretty sloppy cutting job:




And last, while the helicopter clearly appears to be situated at some height above the boats ahead, the readouts on the dash appear to indicate that that door and ramp are open and the parking brake engaged, not to mention that the pilot appears to be holding a pre-flight checklist:




And so on. As one reader pointed out, the tower may in fact be an oil rig adjacent to a helipad (which would also explain why the pilots are in prep mode), but the photo's still clearly been doctored. Badly.

Obviously there are bigger fish to fry when it comes to BP. But every time they fabricate an image like this, it undermines whatever little credibility they have left, along with all of the actual documentation of the massive undertaking this has been and will continue to be. It speaks to a company still more concerned with image than reality, in charge of repairing something so terribly broken that we can't afford to treat it with anything but total candor.


UPDATE: BP has acknowledged that they manipulated the image and has posted the original here. [BP]

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