Thread: Reuters says Mideast photographer doctored shots

Monday, August 7, 2006; Posted: 6:42 p.m. EDT (22:42 GMT)

LONDON, England (Reuters) -- Reuters withdrew all 920 photographs by a freelance Lebanese photographer from its database on Monday after a review of his work showed he had altered two images from the conflict between Israel and Hezbollah.

Global Picture Editor Tom Szlukovenyi called the measure precautionary but said the fact that two of the images by photographer Adnan Hajj had been manipulated undermined trust in his entire body of work.

"There is no graver breach of Reuters standards for our photographers than the deliberate manipulation of an image," Szlukovenyi said in a statement. (Watch another picture Reuters says was manipulated -- 1:32)

"Reuters has zero tolerance for any doctoring of pictures and constantly reminds its photographers, both staff and freelance, of this strict and unalterable policy."

The news and information agency announced the decision in an advisory note to its photo service subscribers. The note also said Reuters had tightened editing procedures for photographs from the conflict and apologized for the case.

Removing the images from the Reuters database excludes them from future sale.

Reuters ended its relationship with Hajj on Sunday after it found that a photograph he had taken of the aftermath of an Israeli air strike on suburban Beirut had been manipulated using Photoshop software to show more and darker smoke rising from buildings.

An immediate inquiry began into Hajj's other work.

It established on Monday that a photograph of an Israeli F-16 fighter over Nabatiyeh, southern Lebanon and dated August 2, had also been doctored to increase the number of flares dropped by the plane from one to three.

"Manipulating photographs in this way is entirely unacceptable and contrary to all the principles consistently held by Reuters throughout its long and distinguished history. It undermines not only our reputation but also the good name of all our photographers," Szlukovenyi said.

"This doesn't mean that every one of his 920 photographs in our database was altered. We know that not to be the case from the majority of images we have looked at so far, but we need to act swiftly and in a precautionary manner."

The two altered photographs were among 43 that Hajj filed directly to the Reuters Global Pictures Desk since the start of the conflict on July 12 rather than through an editor in Beirut, as was the case with the great majority of his images.

Filing drills have been tightened in Lebanon and only senior staff will now edit pictures from the Middle East on the Global Pictures Desk, with the final check undertaken by the editor in charge, Reuters said.

Hajj worked for Reuters as a non-staff contributing photographer from 1993 until 2003 and again since April 2005. Most of his work was in sports photography, much of it outside Lebanon.

Hajj was not in Beirut on Monday and was not responding to calls. He told Reuters on Sunday that the image of the Israeli air strike on Beirut had dust marks which he had wanted to remove.

Questions about the accuracy of the photograph arose after it appeared on news Web sites on Saturday.

Several blogs, including a number which accuse the media of distorted coverage of the Middle East conflict, said the photograph had been doctored.

http://www.cnn.com/2006/WORLD/meast/...eut/index.html

And a pretty shoddy job it was. :roll: Here's another link: http://littlegreenfootballs.com/webl...om_Beirut&only

Don't you just love the way the news media gets the SHEEPLE all beside themselves?


Large sections of the international media are not only misreporting the current conflict in Lebanon. They are also actively fanning the flames of unrest.

The BBC World Service has a strong claim to be the number-one villain. It has come to sound like a virtual propaganda tool for Hezbollah. And as it desperately attempts to prove that Israel is guilty of committing “war crimes” and “crimes against humanity,” it has introduced a new charge — one which I have heard several times on air in recent days.

The newscaster reads out carefully selected “audience comments.” Among these are invariably contained some version of the claim that “Israel’s attack on Lebanon” will serve as a “recruitment” drive for al Qaeda.

But if anything is going to win new recruits for the likes of Osama bin Laden, it will not be Israel’s defensive actions, which are far less damaging than Western TV stations would have us believe, but the inflammatory and hopelessly one-sided way in which they are being reported by those very same news organizations.

While the slanted comments and interviews are bad enough, the degree of pictorial distortion is even worse. From the way many TV stations worldwide are portraying it, you would think Beirut has begun to resemble Dresden and Hamburg in the aftermath of World War II air raids. International television channels have used the same footage of Beirut over and over, showing the destruction of a few individual buildings in a manner which suggests half the city has been razed.

A careful look at aerial satellite photos of the areas targeted by Israel in Beirut shows that certain specific buildings housing Hezbollah command centers in the city’s southern suburbs have been singled out. Most of the rest of Beirut, apart from strategic sites like airport runways used to ferry Hezbollah men and weapons in and out of Lebanon, has been left pretty much untouched.

From the distorted imagery, selective witness accounts, and almost round-the-clock emphasis on casualties, you would be forgiven for thinking that the level of death and destruction in Lebanon is on a par with that in Darfur, where Arab militias are slaughtering hundreds of thousands of non-Arabs, or with the 2004 tsunami that killed half a million in Southeast Asia.

As it happens, Israel has taken great care to avoid killing civilians — even though this has proven extremely difficult and often tragically impossible, since members of Hezbollah, the self-styled “ Party of God,” have deliberately ensconced themselves in civilian homes. Nevertheless the civilian death toll has been mercifully low compared to other international conflicts in recent years.
http://article.nationalreview.com/?q...GQ4OGQxMDA1YjQ

oh man what a crummy cloning job... what was he thinking??

What a tool and a half...

the ahole that did this no longer has a job. Yep, thats right they canned his terrorist lovein ass.

Television news helping Hezbollah
Terrorist: Rocket footage assists in targeting Israel
Posted: August 8, 2006
10:20 p.m. Eastern

By Aaron Klein
© 2006 WorldNetDaily.com

HAIFA, Israel – Hezbollah monitors Israeli and international television news footage of scenes from rocket landings inside Israel and has used the broadcasts the past few weeks to more accurately target installations in the Jewish state, a senior terror leader told WorldNetDaily.

Israeli television and international news outlets such as Fox News, BBC, CNN and SkyNews have been regularly broadcasting, many times live, from the aftermath of Hezbollah rocket attacks on northern Israel.

"Of course the constant stream of television news is helpful for Hezbollah to know whether they hit targets and the location of strategic facilities. A whole department of Hezbollah [in part] monitors this footage," said Abu Oudai, who is a chief of the Al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades terror group's rocket infrastructure in the West Bank.
http://wnd.com/news/article.asp?ARTICLE_ID=51450