Free Republic

Kopel: Were front-page photos staged? Images from Qana raise issue of whether media were manipulated. If you see a news photograph of the war in Lebanon, shot from within Hezbollah territory, can you be confident the picture and caption are accurate? Unfortunately, the answer is no. Earlier this week, Reuters fired photographer Adnan Hajj and withdrew his portfolio of 920 pictures after Little Green Footballs, The Jawa Report, and many other weblogs provided evidence that Hajj had used digital editing and other techniques to fake numerous photos of the Lebanon war. On July 31, the News and Post ran the...

How Much Does It Cost to Buy Global TV News? The vast majority of the TV news pictures you see are produced by two TV news companies. Presented here is a case for how a large amount of money has been used to inject a clear bias into the heart of the global TV news gathering system. That this happens is not at question, whether it is by accident or design is harder to tell. You may not realize it, but if you watch any TV news broadcast on any station anywhere in the world, there is a better than...

DAY 2 - THIS IS OUR 'TOP' POST UNTIL WE GET A RESPONSE FROM AP Page views since posting: 10,411 - First posted: 7.25 PM 10 August 2006. New post underneath this one. They hunt in packs, they film in packs and they lie in packs. And their bosses, sitting in their air-conditioned offices, thousands of miles from the action, back up their lies. And the liar-in-chief is Kathleen Carroll, senior vice president and executive editor for Associated Press. Unlike Reuters' who have at least admitted their photo-fraud and started their own internal investigation, Carroll's hastily-produced "rebuttal" of the staged...

At first everyone thought they were just blowing smoke, but the debunking of a Reuters photograph by a group of Web sites has launched a fiery online war in which bloggers have taken on the mainstream media. Bloggers, or writers on web logs, were the first to reveal that a Reuters photograph depicting plumes of black smoke rising over Beirut was doctored to enhance smoke above the city. The Web site www.LittleGreenFootballs.com is credited with first revealing the scandal, which has been dubbed Reutersgate, but the affair has spread far wider than the Reuters News Agency and into several of...

NEW YORK — As the midterm elections approach, voters say they are much more likely to support a challenger over the incumbent candidate, according to a new FOX News Poll. In addition, "throw the bums out" is a popular choice when voters pick bumper sticker wording to describe the main reason for their vote for Congress this year. President Bush’s job rating is unchanged this month holding steady at 36 percent approval... If the election were held today, 48 percent of Americans say they would vote for the Democratic candidate in their congressional district and 30 percent for the Republican...

ATTENTION EDITORS - CAPTION CORRECTION FOR SJS01 - 05 WHICH WERE TRANSMITTED AT APPROXIMATELY 1725 GMT ON AUGUST 9, 2006. THE CAPTION INCORRECTLY STATES THE CAUSE OF DEATH. CORRECTED VERSIONS IMMEDIATELY FOLLOW THIS ADVISORY. WE ARE SORRY FOR ANY INCONVENIENCE CAUSED. REUTERS. A Palestinian man carries the body of three year-old Raja Abu Shaban, in Gaza August 9, 2006. The three-year-old girl who had been reported killed by an Israeli air strike in Gaza on Wednesday actually died of an accident, Palestinian medical workers said on Thursday. Workers at Gaza's Shifa hospital said on August 10, 2006 that the...

-Snip- As we said about the Reuters incident, media bias is a consensus, not a conspiracy. Consensus is what this apparent rash of unprofessional photography appears to be, which should remind U.S. policy-makers that active public diplomacy is indispensable as long as there are journalists who find war stories too good to check. -Snip-These new instances appear to be shoddy journalism, not propagandizing, and so their bias is inadvertent but nevertheless revealing. -Snip- Once the facts emerge in such cases, the full weight of the government's communications efforts should be made to ensure that the correct information is distributed broadly...

Warning Graphic Content Germany`s NDR presents unpublished video footage from the qana events, demasking "Green Helmet" as a cynical movie director, staging photographs with a liitle boys body. ... (more) Watch the video here Warning: It's graphic.

LGF: “Fauxtography” is born Slublog: Toys in all the right places Extreme Makeover Beirut Edition Allah Pundit * Lebanese pieta * Gway Pundit Ynetnews on AP photos Watch the Video

Media Bias: Need a little anti-war, anti-Semitic buck-up? Try some Reuters coverage. The British news outlet will be only too happy to oblige. Over the weekend, a Reuters photographer was caught trying to make one of Israel's defensive attacks against Hezbollah in Lebanon look much more devastating than it was. The photo was eventually withdrawn and the photographer ostensibly fired. The photo, an image of the aftermath of an Israeli airstrike in Beirut, had apparently been altered to give the effect that the smoke was thicker and the damage worse than it was. The doctored version, credited to Adnan Hajj,...

Take a close look at the above photo. (Pay close attention to his shorts, his dustless chest, muscular torso, the dust on his hands, and the hat tucked in the crook of his arm.) You've probably seen the image before. It was part of a NYTimes photo essay series published online here. It's an iconic image of Lebanese death at the hands of Israel--even described as the Lebanese pieta. Snip Only guess what? The body depicted "buried under the rubble" appears to have been up and walking in the photographer's photo series of the scene throughout the day as a...

The Passion of the Toys In Platoon, Oliver Stone said the first casualty of war is innocence. He was wrong. As the photos here show, the first casualties of war are...the symbols of innocence. And photographers from Reuters and the AP just happened upon many of these perfectly placed symbols of war's horrors. Ben Curtis, AP Sharif Karim, Reuters Sharif Karim, Reuters Sharif Karim, Reuters Issam Kobeisi, Reuters Mohamed Azakir, Reuters This last one is the only one that seems...untouched. Feel the pathos. Mourn for these oh-so-photogenic and suspiciously dust-free trinkets of childhood. Just don't ask any questions about their...

This past Sunday, Major General William McCoy, the commanding general of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Gulf Region Division/Project and Contracting Office in Iraq, sent a letter to the editor of the Washington Post, a copy of which we obtained, in response to a Washington Post article by Andy Mosher on 2 August 2006.After spending almost three days traveling with and being interviewed by one of the co-writers of a very poorly written article Much Undone in Rebuilding Iraq, Audit says , Washington Post, August 2, 2006), I’m astounded at how distorted a good story can become and what...

Altered war Manipulated photos highlight untruths in Mideast conflict By LICIA CORBELLA They say the first casualty of war is Truth. Yesterday, the respected news agency Reuters issued an unprecedented announcement. Essentially, it admitted it unwittingly published propaganda as straight news. In a released statement, the wire agency announced the withdrawal of all 920 photographs by freelance Lebanese photographer, Adnan Hajj from its database "after an urgent review of his work showed he had altered two images from the conflict between Israel and the armed group Hezbollah," said the statement. Wishful thinking on Reuters' part. The breaches go far deeper...

Let's hope Joe Lieberman's Hail Mary toss on Iraq isn't the wave of the future for the Democratic Party. In their story on Lieberman's desperate, clammy, last-ditch attempt to save his political hide, Times reporters Patrick Healy and Jennifer Medina called Lieberman's verbal retrenchment on Iraq -- a mea culpa without the culpa -- "a new set of talking points for Democratic leaders who are struggling for the right words to reconcile their support for the war initially and the fiery antiwar stance of many Democratic voters today." Talking points? More like a recipe for disaster. Read John Zogby's terrific...

Lebanon, Reuters, AP, microcosm There is so much honest news to peddle, I don’t know why the media is offering us so much pure visible tommyrot when it comes to the Israeli attacks, unless they openly favor Hezbollah and have an axe to grind. We have some pretty compelling evidence that the results of the IDF attack on Qana was a put up job and the media’s trumpeting of it all was excessive and came without any serious investigation of Hezbollah’s claims. Reuters soon ran into trouble with their sad sorry attempt to peddle additional smoke signals in a photo...

Reuters reported that 40 people were killed in a Lebanese village by Israeli air strikes. Less than three hours later, the Associated Press reported that the number of casualties had been dropped to one.

Michelle recaps the Hajj/Reuters affair along with great examples of the doctored and staged photos. A must see. Click here to watch the videoA must watch

http://americanthinker.com/articles.php?article_id=5740

The War’s Media Fall-Out From the desk of The Brussels Journal on Mon, 2006-08-07 19:16 A quote from Helen Szamuely on EuReferendum, 7 August 2006 (http://eureferendum.blogspot.com/2006/08/what-we-are-up-against.html) What we are dealing with is not one news agency having a rogue photographer and incompetent editors who then try to cover their backs but a canker that has eaten into almost the entire MSM or, at least, its English language parts. There are various reasons here, I think. One is the bias that is no longer seen as bias. The MSM tends to lean to the left and takes up all left-wing causes...