Or perhaps the headline of this post should read, "American media: you suck at fact-checking."

Iran's state-run media agency has been accused before of having digitally manipulated images released to foreign media. This week, as word spread of purported missile tests in Iran, the validity of an image of four missiles shooting into the sky turned out to be photoshopped -- but not before a bunch of big news organizations printed it as legit.

From the NYT blog The Lede:

Unfortunately, it appeared to contain one too many missiles, a point that had not emerged before the photo appeared on the front pages of The Los Angeles Times, The Financial Times, The Chicago Tribune and several other newspapers as well as on BBC News, MSNBC, Yahoo! News, NYTimes.com and many other major news Web sites.

Agence France-Presse said that it obtained the image from the Web site of Sepah News, the media arm of the Iranian Revolutionary Guards, on Wednesday. But there was no sign of it there later in the day. Today, The Associated Press distributed what appeared to be a nearly identical photo from the same source, but without the fourth missile.

Here's the caption on the NYT illustration above:

In the four-missile version of the image released Wednesday by Sepah News, the media arm of Iran’s Revolutionary Guard, two major sections (encircled in red) appear to closely replicate other sections (encircled in orange).

Boing Boing readers are invited to further manipulate the image, whip up nuclear cat macros, or create topically specific fan-remixed versions of YOU SUCK AT PHOTOSHOP.

Post links in the comments, and our digital manipulation ambassadors will evaluate as hastily as a nuclear missile seeks the heavens.

UPDATE: And the winner is... BB commenter CORPSE1, who says, "Here's my rendition. I fixed up a number of inaccuracies for them."

UPDATE 2: And the hits keep rolling in. More photoshoppery from BB readers after the jump; I'll update this post as more hijinks ensue.