Cox & Forkum Political Cartoons

First it was a Reuter’s Lebanese photographer, Adnan Hajj — since fired — doctoring a photo of a bombed area of Beirut to make it look as if twice, or more, amounts of damage had been done. Then, it was this story about a more recent bombing — also from Reuters:

Lebanon says Israeli air raid kills 40 — By Lin Noueihed

BEIRUT (Reuters) – An Israeli air raid killed more than 40 people in a Lebanese village on Monday, Lebanon’s prime minister said, and other air strikes killed 19 after diplomatic efforts to end the 27-day-old war stalled.

“An hour ago, a horrific massacre took place in Houla village as a result of the intentional Israeli bombardment that resulted in more than 40 martyrs,” Prime Minister Fouad Siniora told an emergency Arab foreign ministers meeting in Beirut.

Uh . . . about that 40 number? The AP has news alert out that is juuuuuuuuuuuuust a weeeeeeeeeee bit different.

The Lebanese prime minister says only one person died in an Israeli air raid on the southern village of Houla, lowering the death toll from 40.

Good ol’ Reuters — just a 4000% error, that’s all. Not bad for a journalist I guess. But wait, there’s more. Ol’ camera-jockey Hajj was also accused of altering another photo used by Reuters, and all of his work has been removed from their databases. If you remember, Hajj had supplied those pics of Hezbollah holding up the rigored bodies of dead children at Haq, photos that many are claiming were staged. Reuters admitted that a second Hajj photo had been manipulated, or Photoshopped if you will. From the looks of things, Hajj is not just dishonest, he’s lazy — not even trying to modify the areas that he clones to look different or unique. Lousy technique, Hajj — stupid even! But hey, he’s Lebanese and has an ax to grind. Can’t blame the fellow for fighting the enemy in his own way — but what about Reuters?

• Founded in London in 1851
• Around 330,000 professional users
• Approximately 15,300 staff in 89 countries
• World’s largest international multimedia news agency – 2,300 editorial staff, journalists, photographers and camera operators in 196 bureaux serving approximately 130 countries
• In 2004 Reuters filed over two and a half million news items, including 440,000 alerts, from 209 countries around the world published in 18 languages.
• Real-time data provided on 5.5 million financial records
• More than 200 million data records maintained and updated containing over 3,000 billion discrete data points (or record fields)
• Information on 35,000 companies worldwide
• Financial information from over 300 exchanges and OTC markets
• Financial data updated over 8,000 times per second, and at peak time more than 23,000 times per second
• More than 4,000 clients contribute prices, opinions and analysis
• Reuters Group 2005 revenue £2.4 billion
• Constituent of FTSE100 index
• Listed on the London Stock Exchange and NASDAQ exchanges: RTR and RTRSY (respectively)
• Reuters is among the most read news sources on the Internet reaching millions in their offices, homes or on PDAs

Damn, you’d like to think they would do better than they have in the last couple of days/weeks! Maybe their antisemitism, anti-Americanism and their BDS is showing?

Lots more at LGF, and Michelle Malkin reacts to Reuters pulling all of Hajj’s pics this way:

My opinion:

If Reuters had half a brain, it would post all of Hajj’s photos on a separate site and welcome continued blogger analysis that uncovered this debacle in the first place. Withdrawing the photos to cover their tracks is a dumb idea.

If they are interested in the truth, they will harness the power of the Internet’s distributed intelligence network–not cut it off.

And then Michelle links to an online video presentation of just how the Hajj bombing pic was altered. Now that’s information! (db)

Technorati Tags: Doctored Photographs, Hajj, Haq, Lebanese Death Count Misstated, Reuters

This entry was posted on Monday, August 7th, 2006 at 8:59 am and is filed under Fever Swamp Madness, Focus On Politics, Media Bias, Media Doin' It Wrong. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.  |   Print This Post  |   Email This Post

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