[CliffFletcher]

Celebrity watchers were speculating about Kate before the altered photo was released, because it’s what celebrity watchers do.

Then the media lost their minds when they discovered the picture was altered. With their shock and hand-wringing, you’d think they were dealing with falsification of important political records, instead of a picture of a woman with her kids. And when the media blew the story up, the gossip-mongerers and conspiracy kooks ran with it.

While we might expect the media to do the decent thing and issue mea culpas over their handling of this, I wouldn’t hold your breath. They know they look like a right bunch of ####s now, but they’ve already switched gears to sympathy and compassion, as though they’re not responsible at all for a mom with cancer needing to videotape a public statement about her very personal illness.