This illustrates my point. "Undoubtedly the intention?" Undoubtedly?
If you're looking for evidence of media ineptitude, you don't have to dig at all. There are plenty of examples of bias. But media bias is like anything else -- if you look hard enough, you'll find it. Whether it's a vision of the Virgin Mary in a water stain on an underpass or a hidden Reuters agenda, if you stare long enough, it will appear.
As I replied to another poster, you can't use the same image to illustrated ham-handed propaganda and subtle manipulation. No one sophisticated enough to tweak the smoke cloud to make the destruction look ten percent larger would let that clumsy photoshop job slip by. Again, I might be a minority of one on this, but I think there's an eagerness to attribute to malice something far more easily explained by incompetence.
I understand what you are saying, Reign. But you explain it away by stating that "it's incompetence" at doctoring a photo. It's not the incompetence that's at issue, it's that he did it at all (and that the editors didn't stop an obvious doctoring)...even for a 10% increase in the appearance of destruction.
The two of you agree, I think, on more than you disagree on.
The point of contention (from what I can tell) is not that there was an attempt to doctor the photo in a way that gave it a more damaged/ominous look (that seems obvious to everyone) but that there was an attempt to interject some subliminal message in the smoke shapes.
This didn't pop up out of the blue. There's a history behind it. Reuters has been caught engaging in blatant pro-Islamofascism before and really wasn't called to account for it. Emotions are riding high right now, and it is more--not less--likely that someone (especially a photographer of Islamic Middle Eastern origin and background) would seize the opportunity to use Reuters' extensive news outlets to publish pro-Islamofascist propaganda.
Okay, so just why would they doctor it at all? What do you think was their intention?
Your attempt to pass this off as some sort of ink blot placed before a patient is sad, misinformed, and in denial of the visual evidence in front of you.
Yes, you can: according to the media, the media DOES NOT, NEVER, EVER manipulate the news in any way, because repeat after me 10,000,000 times "the media is unbiased". Get it? "Unbiased". "The media is unbiased".
That means that ANY manipulation of events, be it in text, video or still photography, blatantly breaks the ethical standards the mass media is so inordinately proud of bragging about.
How do you know?