Last week, almost every news outlet started systematically releasing reports that the photo was a fake and that the person in the image was not Bernie Sanders, but was actually Bruce Rappaport, a fellow student activist with a similar haircut, glasses and stature, who died in 2006.

CNN and MSNBC aired interviews with the Sanders campaign interrogating spokespeople about the photo and insinuating that Sanders was pulling the wool over the eyes of his supporters and the American people.

"Time" ran what they called an exclusive report about clear evidence that the man depicted in the photo was not Bernie Sanders. The "Washington Post" demanded that people, "Stop sending around this photo of 'Bernie Sanders'," writing:

Sanders's supporters have been posting that picture everywhere to imply that he was in the trenches fighting for the rights of African Americans when rival Hillary Clinton was a Republican-supporting "Goldwater Girl." Never mind she backed Democrats in the subsequent presidential elections. Or that her civil rights bona fides go back to 1972, when she investigated school discrimination in Dothan, Ala., for the Children's Defense Fund...