A campaign to win support for Egypt's draft Constitution got off to an awkward start in Cairo on Sunday when observers noted several errors on a large banner promoting what is intended to become the nation's charter and a fundamental expression of Egypt's identity.
To begin with, someone misspelled the word "Egyptian" in Arabic.
It got worse. Within hours of the opening of the campaign, journalists and bloggers discovered that three of the five people pictured on the banner — supposedly a cross section of Egyptians that the Constitution is intended to represent — were apparently not Egyptians at all.
Suspicions grew that the makers of the poster, rather than seeking original photos of Egyptians, had simply searched online for stock images of "a doctor," "a businesswoman," "a farmer," "a man with Down syndrome" and "an Egyptian soldier."
The banner hung at a news conference where some of the people writing the Constitution were promoting it ahead of a planned referendum next month. Egypt's interim rulers regard the referendum as a critical vote of confidence in their legitimacy, five months after the military ousted Egypt's first fairly elected president, Mohamed Morsi.
Among other things, officials hope that a strong vote for the charter will undercut claims by Morsi supporters that Islamists alone enjoy public support, and begin to quiet some of the nation's raging political arguments.
With so much riding on the referendum, the mistakes on the banner seemed hard to fathom.
As Egyptian bloggers were quick to note, it was given a prominent spot at the news conference. But two bloggers, Amro Ali and Malak Boghdady, posting their findings on Twitter, showed that the image of the doctor had been used on the website ehowtogetridofstretchmarks.com; the stock image of the businesswoman already graced the home page of an Irish professional networking site; and the image of the man with Down syndrome was used in an Arizona business magazine last year.
Ahram Online, an English-language site, reported that the image of the soldier was taken, without permission, from the personal blog of an Ahram journalist, Rowan El-Shimi, in which she had criticized the army for beating and detaining protesters after the 2011 revolution.
On Monday, Egypt's official State Information Service apologized for the banner, saying that a civil society organization that is promoting the Constitution had donated the sign but "didn't intend these mistakes."
Robert Mackey reported from New York, and Mayy El Sheikh from Cairo. Kareem Fahim contributed reporting from London.
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