Bloggers ID photos faked by Reuters stringer.

By Richard Koman - August 7, 2006

By Richard Koman for SiliconValleyWatcher.com

Score another MSM takedown for right-wing bloggers. Reuters has pulled two photos of the Israel-Hezbollah War taken by Lebanese photographer Adnan Hajj. Most egregiously, the first photo shows obvious and heavy-handed Photoshop-like cloning of smoke plumes created by Israeli bombing of Hezbollah leaders' residences. Right-wing bloggers, always on the lookout for evidence of left-wing bias in the media immediately flagged the suspicious image.

The doctored photo

The original photo

littlegreenfootballs, which was instrumental in the takedown of Dan Rather, was quick to point out the similarities between the two episodes, namely that the doctoring was so sloppy that even "guys in their pajamas" (to quote Rather) could see it.

It’s so incredibly obvious, it reminds me of the faked CBS memos. Smoke simply does not contain repeating symmetrical patterns like this, and you can see the repetition in both plumes of smoke. There’s really no question about it.

So does this mean that the liberal media is out to spin the war against Israel? Or at least that Reuters photo editors intentionally pass over fraud obvious to amateurs? Perhaps the answer has more to do with economics than politics. MSM-basher Ace of Spades writes:

Reuters has some explaining to do. The whole MSM has some explaining to do. But they will do no explaining, and ask no questions, and embargo the story, because they cannot admit that they have cut foreign budgets to such a degree tthey now rely almost entirely on local stringers of questionable objectivity and integrity for the bulk of their foreign reportage.

If you look at these pages, the bloggers are very conservative. They have an obvious axe to grind. But their near-obsessional dedication to rooting out fraud in the media yields results. Stories like these put the media in a defensive position. They will now overcompensate to show that they are not politically motivated, left-wing, or anti-Israel, even though current coverage is hardly pro-Hezbollah.

The episode shows the short-sightedness of cutting back editorial staff and forcing the most seasoned reporters into early retirement. Since the economic model apparently can't sustain the level of accuracy required, and the bloggers have now established a zero-tolerance policy for errors, there is only one choice. Find a way to include bloggers, "citizen journalists," and a multitude of content providers with varying political agendas - and somehow melt them all together with professional journalists into a mix that has a better self-correction mechanism.

I really think the media cannot just continue to keep cutting reporters, editors and producers and maintain credibility. But the citizen journalism efforts have largely tanked - or shortly will, while YouTube goes crazy. Perhaps Big News will cease to be an industry and will find itself flowing int the digital media ocean.

Email Koman at rkoman /at/ gmail/dot/com

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Comments (2)

valerie:

Are you sure you want to define all the people interested in getting to the truth as right-wingers? I sent an email to the Washington Post about the faked story in Qana a couple of days before I sent an email to Michelle Malkin about Thomas Ricks. Guess who responded first?

Posted: August 8, 2006 8:30 AM

Richard Koman

In this photo case, it was the right-wing bloggers who ID'd the photoshop artifacts and screamed about it. The left have identified extreme bias at Fox ("Outfoxed") and in the major media, as well. But, while NYT's Judith Miller carried Administration water in her stories, we werent' looking at fraudulent documents. The right-wingers are now excelling at poring over evidence and detecting fraud.

So, to your question, no. But I never said that "all the people interested in truth" were on the right.

Posted: August 9, 2006 10:05 AM