Romney photo circulating Web just another fake

There's a photograph circulating the Web showing Presidential candidate Mitt Romney lining up his kids on a stage in t-shirts with large letters on them that are supposed to spell ROMNEY, but they're in the wrong order so they spell RMONEY.

People are having a good laugh circulating it around as the all-time worst Freudian slip. Another awkward moment for the clueless Republican candidate. How dumb can you be, to let something like that happen? What an epic fail!

The problem is that this photo is a photoshopped fake that was created by someone at the Democratic Underground Web site, which has been circulating spoof images that contain R-Money for a while now.

Of course, this is not the first time thousands of people shared a fake shot on their social networks believing, and asserting, that it was real. In 2008, I wrote about the same phenomenon when a photo was being circulated of Sarah Palin standing by a backyard pool in a stars and stripes bikini getting ready to fire off a shotgun.

So much for the self-editing, self-policing potential of social media. Sure, I'm writing this now, and it will be circulated among my friends. Fat lot of good that will do when I'm outnumbered a million to one by people who clearly left their bullshit detectors at home, or who may be aware it's a fake and would rather the truth fit their worldview.

As a cartoonist, I love a good spoof as much as anyone, but it should be cleared identified as one. Otherwise we all lose, and miss professional journalism all the more as it becomes increasingly irrelevant.