Posted on 08/07/2006 6:55:32 AM PDT by SeafoodGumbo
LONDON (Reuters) - 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 photograph by Adnan Hajj, which was published on news Web sites on Saturday, showed thick black smoke rising above buildings in the Lebanese capital after an Israeli air raid in the war with the Shi'ite Islamic group Hizbollah, now in its fourth week.
Reuters withdrew the doctored image on Sunday and replaced it with the unaltered photograph after several news blogs said it had been manipulated using Photoshop software to show more smoke.
Reuters has strict standards of accuracy that bar the manipulation of images in ways that mislead the viewer.
"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 represents a serious breach of Reuters' standards and we shall not be accepting or using pictures taken by him," Whittle said in a statement issued in London.
Hajj worked for Reuters as a non-staff freelance, or contributing photographer, from 1993 until 2003 and again since April 2005.
He was among several photographers from the main international news agencies whose images of a dead child being held up by a rescuer in the village of Qana, south Lebanon, after an Israeli air strike on July 30 have been challenged by blogs critical of the mainstream media's coverage of the Middle East conflict.
Reuters and other news organizations reviewed those images and have all rejected allegations that the photographs were staged.
Copyright 2006 Reuters News Service. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
Call your local paper to ask if they've used Reuters pics from Lebanon. Call you local talk radio station to get this story out there.
ABC is just as vile as Reuters, in all ways, at all times.
ABC is just as vile as Reuters, in all ways, at all times.
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The filthy MSM just continues to out-do itself.
And we are going to bring them down this time. The pitchforks are out. Pinchy and his ilk will not survive the new media onslaught.
Reuters: No cred. No sale.
did the 2nd one have.. um dust marks too?
The New Media refuses to let the Old Media get away with their lies. Photoshopaganda will not be tolerated.
It's because they are lazy and don't want to investigate a fellow dinosaur. They've got to circle the wagons, lest more and more examples of this become exposed.
"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,"
Riiiiiiiiight. That's right up there with "How'd that $10K get my frezeer", "the b%tch set me up" and "I didn't have sex with that women".
Can't wait to hear what Rush has to say about all this today.
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