Yes, it’s true. I don’t know what page it’s on, because I haven’t seen the magazine. [Charles says it’s on page 8.] But I know it’s in issue number 890, dated Aug. 11, 2006, the one with something called “Little Miss Sunshine” on the cover.

Someone from Entertainment Weekly magazine called me on Tuesday, to ask if it would be fair to describe me as a “conservative Christian.” I told him it would. And now, a story in the latest issue contains a genuine Sean Gleeson quote. The article, punningly titled “Mel to Pay?,” by Daniel Fierman, explores the possible repurcussions of Mel Gibson’s drunken rampage. My quote is in the sixth paragraph (counting those two Gibson quotes on top as paragraphs).

But the most troubling news for the 50-year-old director is that, aside from some fundamentalist leaders, even people who loved The Passion seem deeply dismayed. “Like many millions of others, I lost a great deal of respect for Mel Gibson yesterday,” wrote conservative Christian blogger Sean Gleeson. “If I lost more than most, it’s because I had more than most…. I do admire his immediate and candid apology, and I do forgive him. I urge the country to forgive him… and put him in prison.”

The quotes, of course, were taken from my July 30 post “Bad boy, good guy, antisemite.”

And apparently “Little Miss Sunshine” is a motion picture. The EW reviewer called it “schlock” and gave it a “C.”

This is a news photo credited to Adnan Hajj sent on the Reuters wire today. Here’s the link [Yahoo took that page down on Aug. 6]. But it is not a real photograph; it would more accurately be called a photo-illustration.

Or, even more accurately, a fake.

Most of the huge clouds of black smoke billowing into the sky were manufactured on a computer. It seems that the photographer was not content with whatever smoke was really recorded in the picture, so he used a retouching technique known as “cloning” to fill up the frame.

Cloning, as the word implies, makes duplicates of the desired regions of the image. That’s why the smoke in this picture looks so oddly repetitive. It’s repetitive because it has been repeated.

Kudos to LGF blog for breaking this scandal. It occurs to me that the only reason this particular fake was caught is that it is a terrible job. Manipulating images is one of my professional skills, and if I wanted to, I could fill a sky with smoke and nobody would know the difference.

I had always supposed that the news wires had some sort of technical control measures to prevent fakery, but it seems that at Reuters, not only do they not use any high-tech system, but they evidently don’t even look at the pictures going out under their name.

UPDATE, AUG. 6: Here you go: Reuters admits to doctoring Beirut photo

Reuters was notified of the alteration by American bloggers who noticed repeating patterns within the smoke plumes, indicating that part of the image was duplicated several times.

So, we caught this very badly done fake. I wonder, how many well made fakes slip by?