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From the archives
May. 11th, 2009 12:11 pmYou kids, with your Photoshop. You don’t know you’re born. Time was, if you were compelled to doctor a photo in the national press, you had to do it by hand.
In 1990 a British lorry bound for Iraq was searched in Greece and found to be carrying components for a “supergun”. These components had been designed and made by a small British company, a situation that did not seem ever to have troubled the government until the point where it looked as if we might find ourselves looking down the barrel of the thing. Suddenly the administration was busily seizing shipments, along with the moral high ground, and imprisoning the company’s directors. Meanwhile, the Greek authorities imprisoned the unwitting truck driver, Paul Ashwell, for illegal arms importation.
There was a general outcry over here about Ashwell’s arrest, and the Daily Mirror started a campaign to have him freed. This gathered steam and had been front-page news for a while when the Sun belatedly decided that it, too, was concerned about his fate, but it had scarcely allowed itself enough time even to print his name before the Foreign Office succeeded in getting him released. The occasion was subsequently covered by both newspapers:
Yes, this is what was deemed skilful doctoring in a national newspaper in 1990—an alteration considered virtually undetectable by the naked eye. It was a simpler time.
In 1990 a British lorry bound for Iraq was searched in Greece and found to be carrying components for a “supergun”. These components had been designed and made by a small British company, a situation that did not seem ever to have troubled the government until the point where it looked as if we might find ourselves looking down the barrel of the thing. Suddenly the administration was busily seizing shipments, along with the moral high ground, and imprisoning the company’s directors. Meanwhile, the Greek authorities imprisoned the unwitting truck driver, Paul Ashwell, for illegal arms importation.
There was a general outcry over here about Ashwell’s arrest, and the Daily Mirror started a campaign to have him freed. This gathered steam and had been front-page news for a while when the Sun belatedly decided that it, too, was concerned about his fate, but it had scarcely allowed itself enough time even to print his name before the Foreign Office succeeded in getting him released. The occasion was subsequently covered by both newspapers:
Yes, this is what was deemed skilful doctoring in a national newspaper in 1990—an alteration considered virtually undetectable by the naked eye. It was a simpler time.
