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AL-REUTERS: HEZBOLLAH PROPAGANDIST |
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Written by Jack Kelly
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Thursday, 10 August 2006 |
Reuters announced Sunday (August 6) it was suspending its
relationship with Adnan Hajj, a freelance photographer in Lebanon who had
worked for the British news service since 1993, because he doctored a
photograph on the aftermath of an Israeli air strike in south Beirut.
Mr. Hajj cloned the image of a plume of smoke rising from a
bombed building, which made it appear the damage was more widespread than in
fact it was.
The doctoring was discovered by Web logger Charles Johnson
(Little Green Footballs), the man who proved the memo then CBS anchor Dan
Rather was relying on for his expose of President Bush's National Guard service
had been typed on Microsoft Word, which did not exist at the time of the date
on the memo.
In announcing the suspension, Reuters quoted its head of
public relations, Moira Whittle, as saying: "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."
Perhaps Mr. Hajj also was attempting to remove dust marks
when he cloned (twice) an image of a flare being dropped from an Israeli F-16
in a photo he took Aug. 2. The caption says, erroneously, that the F-16
was dropping bombs.
This doctoring was discovered by Web logger Rusty
Shackleford (Jawa Report). After investigating Mr. Schackleford's
charges, Reuters announced Monday it was withdrawing from its data base all 920
photographs Mr. Hajj took for them.
"There is no graver breach of Reuters' standards for
our photographers than the deliberate manipulation of an image," said
Reuters global picture editor, Tom Szlukovenyi.
The cloning in the photographs was clumsy, which suggests
that Mr. Hajj should not take all the blame for their distribution. What
is the point of having photo editors if they cannot spot such obvious frauds?
This is especially so because another stringer for Reuters,
Issam Kobeisi, may be involved in a staged photograph. Mr. Kobeisi
transmitted July 22 a photo of a woman wailing outside the wreckage of what the
caption said was her apartment building.
A British Web logger (Drinking From Home) noticed that on
Aug. 5, AP photographer Hussein Malla transmitted a photo of the very same
woman (she has a scar on her left cheek and a mark under her right eye) wailing
in front of an entirely different bombed building. If she isn't the most
unlucky multiple property owner in Beirut, then the photo most likely was
staged.
What is significant about Mr. Hajj is not the two
photographs Reuters admits he doctored, but the doubt it casts on the veracity
of the other images he's transmitted.
Mr. Hajj was among those whose dramatic photos of dead
children being pulled from the wreckage of a building the Israelis bombed in
the village of Qana July 30 helped turn world opinion against Israel.
Dr. Richard North, a British Web logger (EU Referendum),
thinks these photographs were staged, because rescue workers clearly carrying
the same corpse are wearing different gear in different photographs. The
time stamps on the photos suggest they were taken hours apart, he said.
Other Web loggers have noted that while some of corpses
allegedly retrieved from the site were covered with dust (as one would expect
from a collapsed building), others were not. Some apparently were in
rigor mortis; others not.
There have been questions about Qana the news media have
made little effort to answer.
The Israeli air force bombed the building at 1:00
a.m., but says it didn't collapse until around 8:00 a.m. This could have
been a delayed reaction to the bombing; the result of secondary explosions (the
Israelis thought Hezbollah was storing munitions in the building), or the
product of demolition by Hezbollah.
If one assumes the collapse was the result of the bombing,
one has to wonder why those inside made no effort to leave during the hours
between the bombing and the building's fall, and those outside made no effort
to rescue them.
A German newspaper (the Bild Zeitung) described "Green
Helmet," a central figure in the Qana photographs I wrote about in my last
column, as "a professional Hezbollah propaganda man."
This is a major scandal. Reuters has been transmitting
Hezbollah propaganda. We need to know how much, whether photo editors
were complicit, and what Reuters intends to do to keep this from happening
again.
And if Mr. Hajj staged photographs at Qana, he wasn't alone.
Stringers for AP and Agence France Press transmitted the same images.
It's often been said that truth is the first casualty in
war. But it shouldn't be the news media that kills it.
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