[I]t’s only been about 10 months since Time Magazine declined to choose an individual for its much-devalued Person of the Year award, so it only stands to reason they’re back in the hunt. It’s also been nearly a decade since Time named someone (or thing) from the tech industry — Jeff Bezos in 1999 — and more than 20 years since they named the PC its “Machine of the Year.” Also, it’s not an election year, so it won’t be the winner of the presidential election. It’s time for another gimmick!

At left, our Photoshopped prediction from two months ago. At right, Time Warner’s actual latest cover, announced this weekend:

       

Although Blog P.I. doesn’t make prognostications a regular part of what we do, we have made a few good calls — Not Paul Begala told you here first that Jon Tester wasn’t getting an Appropriations seat, and again relying upon this year’s breakout phenomenon, we did start talking about the “YouTube election” well ahead of most.

But if we can’t even pick a fantasy football team that makes the playoffs, we’re not going to stake our rep on predicting the future. So the answer is yes, they really are that predictable.

Only problem: The pictured soldier is actually Canadian, and Johnson’s readers quickly located more stills, providing conclusive evidence that a Democratic Photoshopper had doctored the image to remove a medal evidently believed to be a dead giveaway (but embarrassingly leaving another — the funny lapel pin).

This phenomenon is common enough now that such images have come to merit their own word: Fauxtoshop. In November 2005, MoveOn.org ran a TV spot conservative bloggers found politically outrageous, and which luckily happened to be an example of this burgeoning trend. Much like this latest imbroglio, the uniforms of foreign troops (this time, British) were modified to look more American:

In both cases, one wonders just how hard it would be to find a genuine photograph of members of the U.S. armed services looking vaguely aggrieved or lining up for a plateful of slop. The circumstances were slightly different in one of the earliest instances of blog-era political fauxtoshoppery, an image from the front page of the Bush-Cheney ‘04 official website, offending sections encircled by an unidentified Kossack:

Here, the idea was to make it look a lot cooler, as if this wall of troops just went on forever. Just as their counterparts on the right saw leftist perfidy in later fauxtoshop jobs, this manipulation was seized upon by the nascent netroots as another strike against A”W”OL.

But what should we make of all this? Be assured, neither side is above manipulating images of American troops for political expediency. These incidents say a lot less about comparative patriotism than than about the primacy of images in propaganda. Good visuals are hard to come by, and if a deceptive visual is more striking than a real image, unfortunately, that’s considered good enough.

P.S. There is also, of course, the recent case of photo manipulation by Lebanese Reuters photographer Adnan Hajj, also brought to light at Little Green Footballs:

While it falls beyond U.S. partisan considerations and does not involve soldiers per se, it is also probably the biggest Photoshop fraud uncovered by those pesky bloggers, and certainly deserves mention here.

P.P.S. Any journalism professor worth his whiskey makes sure freshman communications students hear about the distortive power of photographs. Already in the curriculum, I’m sure, is the recent case of an ambiguous photograph by Thomas Hoepker of young Brooklynites observing South Manhattan on Sept. 11, which has been the recent subject of debate at Slate:

Unlike the military-themed images above, this photo underwent no changes. When it’s hard enough to tell what undoctored images mean, one might hope that propagandists would use images in their proper contexts — but one might be hoping for an awful long time.