Reuters And The Cloned Blown Smoke

Bloggers (I personally refer to myself as an “online columnist”) have taken a lot of heat over the years from the “real” media. The argument issued is that bloggers have no “filters” or editors to keep us from disseminating incorrect information.

I contend we do. Should I screw up, there are several thousand readers out there at any time that will promptly remind me, or any of us, that a piece of information is incorrect, and will bug us mercilessly until we make the proper correction.

The New York Times can just refuse to answer their readers.

I further contend, that if it weren’t for the blogsphere playing watchdog on an arrogant and biased media, Monica Lewinsky may possibly be running for re-election to the Congress with Clinton-thank-you-soft-hush-money, and Dan Rather and Mary Mapes would’ve received Pulitzer Prizes for securing President Kerry’s election with those “forged but accurate” National Guard documents outing George W. Bush.

As the mainstream media is so arrogant that they feel they can pull anything over anyone’s eyes because they are in agreement that the public is so intellectually beneath them, it was only a matter of time before they tried to pull another fast one.

And it wasn’t long before they got busted….

“Reuters withdraws photograph of Beirut after Air Force attack after US blogs, photographers point out ‘blatant evidence of manipulation.’ Reuters’ head of PR says in response, ‘Reuters has suspended photographer until investigations are completed into changes made to photograph.’ Photographer who sent altered image is same Reuters photographer behind many of images from Qana, which have also been subject of suspicions for being staged.”
— Yaakov Lappin, August 6, 2006 Ynetnews

As a professional graphic artist of 30 years I found this attempt, by whoever was responsible, sloppy at best, an insult to the intelligence of the readers at the worst.

Here is the photograph in question….

According to the Jerusalem Post, “The photograph, as initially published, showed an aerial view of Beirut after an IAF attack, with two large pillars of smoke rising over the city. The caption read: ‘Smoke billows from burning buildings destroyed during an overnight Israeli air raid on Beirut’s suburbs.’”

Now as I have Photoshop, let me give you my take on how someone attempted to play us all for the fool.

Thanks to the good ol’ boys at Little Green Footballs, the possible original for this faked photo has been discovered, taken on July 26, 2006 by Ben Curtis of the Associated Press.

This could be a Jayson Blair I-was-there-when-I-wasn’t moment attempted by Reuters photographer Adnan Hajj. He may not just be guilty of manipulating a photograph, but one could conceivably toss in plagiarism to his growing list of offenses.

Photoshop is a graphic art program that enables a trained person to create imagery to order. It has many tools that enable one to cut, paste, resize, reshape, hue, tint, and add effects to images. One can change the color of someone’s eyes, remove blemishes from a face, and such techniques have been used going back to the early Penthouse Magazine days.

However, such doctoring was supposedly taboo when it came to “news” photos. Time Magazine broke that rule with the infamous O.J. Simpson darkened mug shot cover photo, and more recently, USA Today with the zombie-like whitening of Condoleezza Rice’s eyes.

Using Photoshop, I’ve isolated a building on the lower right of the original image. Maybe an obscure building to the casual reader. Now let’s look at the infamous picture in question….

The building I’ve isolated here and the one supposedly behind it look curiously similar to that in the Associated Press photo. But I also said the attempt was sloppy.

In the clouds you can see a repetitive pattern. The cloning tool in Photoshop was used here, and in a most careless, amateurish fashion. Either the “artist” was new to the program, or not very good, but to honestly think this could be passed off without being caught is laughable.

As I like to throw people’s words back in their face, I have to admit Michelle Malkin beat me to this one. According to the “news-gathering policy” from Reuters’ website, “Our policy is to send news to our customers only after scrutiny by a group of production editors who ensure quality standards are maintained across all our news services. When we get something wrong, our policy is to be honest about errors and to correct them promptly and clearly.”

Now seeing how Mary Mapes is going around to this day, still stating the forged National Guard documents were authentic, what makes us believe that without the bloggers, Reuters would have caught and corrected this fraud on their own?

Clearly, this is another example of the real filters out there. Filters that protect the public from arrogance run amok by the traditional news media, full of journalists who “want to make a difference” instead of just reporting the news as it happens; not as they want it to be.

We should all be comforted by the fact that Reuters is conducting an investigation. I maintain all the evidence has been laid out and unless there’s a bloodstained glove somewhere, the verdict is guilty.

UPDATE:

“Reuters, the global news and information agency, 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.”

“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. This represents a serious breach of Reuters’ standards and we shall not be accepting or using pictures taken by him.”
— Moira Whittle, head of public relations for Reuters in a statement issued in London

Bad lighting on a computer screen and dust marks on a digital photograph…? Maybe Moira should take a Photoshop class before she swallows that BS.

ANOTHER UPDATE

Reuters released a side-by-side comparison of the photo in question:

“Reuters on Sunday withdrew an image of smoke rising from burning buildings after an Israeli air strike on the suburbs of Beirut on August 5, 2006 after evidence emerged that it had been manipulated to show more smoke. The manipulated image is shown on the left. The unaltered image, shown on the right, has since run. Reuters has told the photographer, freelance Adnan Hajj, that the agency will not use any more of his pictures.”

YET ANOTHER UPDATE: Reuters admits to more image manipulation

I guess we should call this Death By A Thousand Cuts. There’s more….

This entry was posted on Sunday, August 6th, 2006 at 3:45 pm and is filed under Vox Populi. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. | 260 views | Trackback | Print this page |

Bob Parks is a member/writer for the National Advisory Council of Project 21, and VP of Marketing and Media Relations/Staff Writer for the New Media Alliance, Inc. | More from Bob Parks