Where There's 'Smoke,' There's a Firing
Reuters finds itself in the middle of the latest journalistic scandal: The wire service "told a freelance Lebanese photographer on Sunday it would not use any more of his pictures after he doctored an image of the aftermath of an Israeli air strike on Beirut." Blogger Charles Johnson (http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=21956_Reuters_Doctoring_Photos_from_Beirut&only) exposed the fake photo, which seemed to show two plumes of smoke rising from buildings in the Lebanese capital.
The original photo (shown here [http://today.reuters.com/news/newsPhotoPresentation.aspx?type=topNews&imageID=2006-08-06T215559Z_01_L06301298_RTRUKOP_0_PICTURE0.xml] alongside the altered one) shows one burning building and far less smoke. Johnson analyzed the doctored photo and found repeating patterns, which could only be the result of digital manipulation. Reuters reports on the laughable explanation offered by photographer Adnan Hajj:
"The photographer has denied deliberately attempting to manipulate the image, saying that he was trying to remove dust marks and that he made mistakes due to the bad lighting conditions he was working under," said Moira Whittle, the head of public relations for Reuters.
This explanation is implausible on its face, but it becomes even more ridiculous with the revelation that another Hajj photo was similarly manipulated. This one, first noted by blogger "Rusty Shackleford," [http://mypetjawa.mu.nu/archives/184206.php] purports to show an Israeli F-16 plane firing missiles. In fact, according to Shackleford, they are "flares designed to be a decoy for surface to air missiles." And although the picture purports to show three of these "missiles," in fact two of them are simply copies of the first. YnetNews reports that Reuters has acknowledged this photo was faked as well.
Other Hajj photos carry captions that appear to be inaccurate:
A Hajj photo [http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/060806/ids_photos_ts/r1428781317.jpg]transmitted yesterday carries the caption: "A Lebanese man runs away from the burning ruins of a building destroyed during an overnight Israeli air raid on Beirut's suburbs August 5, 2006. Many buildings were flattened during the attack." But the picture plainly was taken in broad daylight. As blogger "Bullwinkle" [http://www.bullwinkleblog.com/?p=1747] (no relation to Marshall Wittmann) [http://www.bullwinkleblog.com/?p=1747] quips, the photo's subject must be "the world's slowest man."
PowerLineBlog [http://powerlineblog.com/archives/014919.php] reader Robert Opalecky notes a pair of Hajj photos from a Hezbollah stronghold in Beirut. The caption on the first: "Journalists are shown by a Hizbollah guerrilla group the damage caused by Israeli attacks on a Hizbollah stronghold in southern Beirut, July 24 2006." [http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/060724/photos_ts/2006_07_24t124150_450x293_us_mideast] And the second: "A Lebanese woman looks at the sky as she walks past a building flattened during an overnight Israeli air raid on Beirut's suburbs August 5, 2006." [http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/060806/photos_ts/2006_08_05t072545_450x325_us_mideast] The photos, taken 12 days apart, show the same purportedly just-destroyed building.
Nor is it only Hajj. The blog Drinking From Home [http://drinkingfromhome.blogspot.com/2006/08/extreme-makeover-beirut-edition.html] notes a Reuters [http://in.news.yahoo.com/060722/137/662sn.html] photo and an Associated Press [http://news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&u=/060805/481/6e91ad31bb4847c0906a1cfb98461570] photo that both show the same woman, whose home (an apartment according to Reuters, a house according to AP) Israel supposedly has just destroyed. The Reuters photo is dated July 22, while the AP one is dated Aug. 5--two weeks apart.
London's Guardian [http://media.guardian.co.uk/presspublishing/story/0,,1839149,00.html] reports that Reuters has now "withdrawn all photographs taken by Beirut-based freelance Adnan Hajj from its database"--though many of them still appear on Yahoo [http://news.search.yahoo.com/news/search?p=%22adnan+hajj%22&c=news_photos] and other news Web sites:
The news agency has also instituted "a tighter editing procedure" for images of the war in the Middle East conflict after what it calls "the gravest breach" of Reuters standards.
This is a good start, but the problem may go beyond photojournalism. Anti-Israel editorializing can be found in Reuters' text as well, as in this Beirut dispatch by Alaa Shahine: [http://today.reuters.co.uk/news/articlenews.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=2006-08-06T081732Z_01_L03205260_RTRUKOC_0_UK-MIDEAST.xml]
Israel's definition of Hizbollah targets has included more than 70 bridges, as well as ports, airports, radar stations, television and telephone masts, factories, farms and countless homes pummelled into ruin by 26 days of bombing across Lebanon.
Nor is this only a Reuters problem. YnetNews [http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3286880,00.html#n] points to an especially blatant example from the Guardian (second item):
An article in the London-based Guardian, entitled "Militants merge with mainstream," [http://www.guardian.co.uk/israel/Story/0,,1837874,00.html] argues that Hizbullah has gained widespread, cross-religious support in the Arab world, and uses terms such as "the Qana massacre" to explain the apparent newfound unity. . . .
The article was co-written by Issandr el-Amrani, a freelance journalist in Egypt who referred to Hizbullah as "Lebanese resistance fighters" on his personal blog [http://arabist.net/archives/category/israelpalestine/] and who describes reports of Hizbullah members operating out of civilian areas as "Israeli lies."
(Correction: The "Israeli lies" comment [http://arabist.net/archives/2006/07/29/hiding-among-civilians-really/] comes from another contributor to el-Amrani's blog.)
We don't mean to gainsay the difficulty of covering the news in an alien culture dominated by terror and tyranny. But too many news organizations are too willing to turn themselves into propaganda outlets. One hopes the Reuters photo scandal will prompt a wider rethinking of the use of free-lancers in places like Lebanon and the disputed territories
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