Sarah Palin in a bikini holding an AK47 - CNN duped by forgery

Regular readers will know this blog highlights and tries to deconstruct the theatre of American politics and punditry.

Usually when there is a damaging meme out there, I can usually detect whether it's a clever propaganda play or plain lazy journalism. In this instance I don't know what to make of it.

During a panel conversation discussing Sarah Palin's "celebrity", CNN Entertainment reporter Lola Ogunnaike passes off a clearly 'photoshopped' picture of the would-be VP as being authentic.

KURTZ: But if it's a "Lifetime Movie of the Week," Lola, then it seems to me that it's a very mixed picture from the point of view of a ticket that is trying to get, you know, John McCain and Sarah Palin elected president and vice president of the United States. In other words, it's great to be a celebrity, and she'll get a book deal out of it and maybe her own television show, but does it undercut the effort to paint her as a serious, reform-minded governor?

OGUNNAIKE: And that's what she is going to have to guard against. I mean, McCain has been really good about painting Obama as this lightweight, using the word "celebrity" as a pejorative. They don't want to have a boomerang effect. They don't want that to come back on Sarah Palin, and people say, yes, she looks good in a bikini clutching an AK-47, but is she equipped to run the country?

Read the full CNN 'Reliable Sources' (Sep 7, 2008) transcript

I would hope CNN and Howard Kurtz to address this in a future broadcast.

Read discussion at Gawker - CNN Duped By Palin Photoshop
Read Discussion from Newsbusters - CNN Duped by Sarah Palin Bikini Photoshops

Update:
Here is a more comprehensive look at the role Photoshopping plays in current political discourse
Photoshop for Democracy Revisited: The Sarah Palin File

average citizens were exploiting their expanded capacity to manipulate and circulate images to create the grassroots equivalent of editorial cartoons...
they aim lower than what we would expect from an established publication and so they are a much blunter measure of how popular consciousness is working through shifts in the political landscape..

Thanks to kind reader Simon