Sunday, August 06, 2006
The Reuters photography scandal
On the small chance you haven't read about the Reuters photography scandal (in which Reuters published pictures of burning buildings in Beirut, absurdly altered to exaggerate the damage) elsewhere, perhaps because you were "down the Shore," as I was, American Thinker has a comprehensive round-up. As usual, Charles Johnson led the analytical work, with Dan Riehl explaining it all for those of us who need diagrams. Dan also catches more fakery, this time in the form of staged pictures, by the same al-Reuters photographer.
You know, the press has been doing this sort of thing forever. It is only recently that we have had the means to expose it in real time. Don't forget that.
BONUS: Cox and Forkum's thousand words:
DOUBLE BONUS!: Even more Reuters fraud on display at Power Line!
Reuters has now fired the photographer in question, declaring him a "Lebanese freelancer." No apology, though.
If a company in any other industry had internal controls this bad, the press would drop the hammer and hold the CEO accountable. If some 9th echelon moron in a federal agency does something stupid, it's Bush's fault. But a media company, actually responsible for the stuff it publishes? Allah forfend.
4 Comments:
By 
Dylan, at
Sun Aug 06, 09:29:00 PM:
Yet more Reuters photo weirdness:
http://drinkingfromhome.blogspot.com/2006/08/extreme-makeover-beirut-edition.html
By 
, at
Mon Aug 07, 11:07:00 AM:
This is a long time coming. No photo, on a blog or from a professional photographer, should be taken at face value without accompanying raw image, metadata, documentation. One advantage that the MSM should have over bloggers is that they can afford to hire experts whose job it should be to do nothing but examine photos for evidence of tampering. I hope Reuters is shocked to its senses on this issue.
OTOH, I think that the severity of this particular incident is being blown out of proportion - and Reuters has admitted its mistake, hopefully their controls will improve, otherwise, they will deservedly go out of business.
By , at
Mon Aug 07, 12:08:00 PM:
And now we have the Lebanese P.M. admitting that the death toll from an Israeli strike on Houla was slightly (40 times) exaggerated. I propose that the MSM be placed on some 24 hour delay while its stories are fact-checked by apparently more responsible bloggers.
By , at
Tue Aug 08, 10:00:00 PM:
I offer you this, in order for the whole thing to get arithmetically right and dandy:
A parachute; a pocket calculator; and a one-way ticket to the battlefield anywhere in Lebanon.
For any of the numerous massacres, any error in counting the exact number of the war crime victims will cost you your job and you'll be denounced worldwide.
I'm sure we can count on courageous supercompetent people like you.
As for the "photo scandal", I find the photos rather eloquent as being witness to the real scandal: the destruction of a whole society by a racist state turned psychopath and criminal.
