1

These are good points, and many of the examples you mention are clear frauds which should be strenuously condemned. But the Web site you link, and the commentators at Little Green Footballs, seem intent on proving that "the media" are in conspiracy against them, when in fact their own examples show that that's largely not the case.

They insist on blaming Reuters for "bias" for having printed doctored or staged photos. But none of them seem to understand that Reuters gets the photos from the photographers and has no control over their content other than cropping. (Reuters could be photoshopping the images on its own after receiving them, but the examples appear to show the opposite, and the commentators have no evidence to the contrary.)

The most obvious cases - the photoshopped bombing smoke trails and the jet flare trails - were all the work of the same photographer, who was a freelancer not employed by Reuters, and who has now been banned from further filings with them. Printing them was clumsy, but then Reuters is in an industry that competes on speed, and doesn't have a worldwide network of pajama-clad hypercritics to scrutinize every image they get. Clearly that photographer was doctoring images - either for political purposes or to make them more saleable - but Reuters could not have known that in advance.

Some of the claimed examples on the Web pages you cite are likely false. Zombietime claims that the same photo with the doctored smoke trails was also copied from an earlier photo of the scene - they have a blinking graphic with an overlay of the two images. But it's obvious that two photos of the same city shot from the same nearby hilltop would show the same buildings. They have another claim - also supported by blinking graphic overlays - that along with the doctored smoke column, two buildings in the scene were copied and pasted into another part of the city. This claim doesn't even make sense - why would the photographer do that? - it adds nothing to the picture. Their graphic appears to show a similarity, but the second image is blurry, and the similarity comes largely from the fact that they pasted the first image over it. Besides which, it is common for architects to erect the same design multiple times in a given area. Finally, LGF prints the original photo, which Reuters admitted was doctored to beef up the smoke columns, but which also shows the same buildings LGF claims in two separate cases were copied or doctored. In other words, Zombietime is right about the smoke columns, but also claimed two other kinds of fraud which are not supported by evidence on the photo both they and Reuters agree was doctored. It sounds like Reuters is actually more correct than them on this photo - they only made one mistake with it!

Most of the other claims are either ungrounded, speculative, or have to do with captions, which are famously inaccurate simply because the editors make them up without having the full facts in hand. There is certainly reasonable suspicion about why the same people seem to reappear in photos over and over - the old woman is one, and the "green helmet" rescue worker is another. But many critics have claimed they found a staged photo simply because the same person was photographed by two different agencies - a perfectly common event. (There was a huge outcry last week when the right-wing jihadis noticed that the digital time stamps on some pictures of the same scene were different. It never occurred to any of them that the time stamps came from different cameras and different agencies, and were not synchronized.) In other cases they have no evidence whatsoever - they just think the photos don't "feel" right, or are too "strategic" (as if professional news photographers are deliberately wandering a war zone looking for bad photos that don't tell a story). On the Web site you link, there is a long series of shots of rescue workers, with virulent criticism that they were faked and that the photographer was complicit in fraud. It ends with an admission that there is nothing wrong with the shots after the caption was corrected. (One rescue worker also became a victim after he fell in the rubble and was hurt; he was photographed standing and then later being lifted up, but the original caption was wrong. On that basis, they claimed as a fact that the photographer - who doesn't write the captions - had committed fraud. They had the goodness to admit they were wrong, but no word on any apology to Time, Reuters, or the photographer.) Other times, they rightly catch duplicated pictures of the same scenes, but then read the minds of the photo editors to determine that it wasn't just a mistake. These are not evidence of deception - just that real history doesn't come in neatly packaged and unambiguous dioramas.

In short, it's worth keeping an eye on the media, and recognizing that mistakes get made and, rarely, actual fraud creeps in. But it's simply self-indulgent paranoia to claim that this is "media bias" or some sort of conspiracy. The examples you cite are most not examples of clear fraud - some of them are not even examples of inaccuracies. And these are the most blatant examples the ideologically-driven right-wing critics could come up with: one photoshopped bombing site (which was an actual bombing site); one photoshopped jet plane; one old lady; one rescue worker who looks strangely like Jean Reno; one rescue worker who was injured but not dead (quelle scandale!); and a bunch of questionable captions - all this from the middle of a war zone. Sounds like the media are actually doing all right, considering.

The news media function by taking input from news-gatherers whom they have to trust. In the short run, it is certainly possible to commit fraud, as Jason Blair and Adnan Hajj demonstrated; in the long run, it gets found out and corrected. Savvy media consumers should bear that in mind, but it hardly proves anything about "the media" as an institution other than that it is vulnerable to fraud - like almost every other industry.

2

Kevin

I'm guessing you don't work in the media and don't use Photoshop, because you couldn't say some of the things you do if you understood both. (I do on both counts.) Your example from LGF site about the smoke plumes shows an obvious example of the cloning tool in Photoshop. You grab a portion of an image, copy it and paste it somewhere else. It's similar to the cut-and-paste function in a Word processing program, except when cloning in Photoshop it is up to the artist/photographer to blend the cloned portions. (You'd be surprised at the amount of cloning that goes on in commercial photography--dropping the neckline on a dress by cloning a portion of the model's flesh around her breasts, for example.) Note the very unprofessional job of cloning in the smoke plumes. Smoke just does not have repeating patterns like that. A sharp photo editor, who surely recognizes cloning when he sees it, should have leapt out of his chair when he saw that. Yeah, maybe he was rushed, not operating under a conspiracy, but it surely betrays a case of an editor seeing what he wanted to see.

The duped building is a perfect example of cloning, too. The two match too perfectly, right down to the way the light and shadows interplay in the image. It's simply wishful thinking to say it's a case of an architect having two of his buildings built in the same city.

Going back to photo editors, they need to be less credulous in the images they accept, like the site that shows the images of "white T-shirt guy" and "green helmet guy" obviously staging their "grief." A newspaper editor should not accept at face value anything a reporter hands him, just as the reporter should not accept at face value something a source tells him. Why then do photo editors get a pass in your book?

3

The blog Drinking From Home has another blatant example of staging. A Lebanese woman who is wearing the same clothes, that has the same scar on her left cheek, and the same mark under her right eye, appears in two different photos crying about the destruction of her home.

As the blogger notes, “Either this woman is the unluckiest multiple home owner in Beirut, or something isn't quite right.”

Actually CNN had a story on this last night and they said that the photographer is standing behind this photo. The woman indeed is a unlucky preson in Beirut. That in itself isn't totally implausible, I've seen reports in the US about people who have lost several homes to hurricanes year after year....just can't stop building in bad spots...esp. if the gov't will subsidize their flood insurance.

Also another possibility is simply that the caption was wrong. Perhaps the apt. building was owned by members of her family or whatnot and then she returns home to find her home too has been destroyed or something like that. People who own multiple lots of property tend to have them close together so it isn't so implausible. I'm sure you can find at least a few people who lost more than one piece of property in Katrina.

4

If these are honest mistakes, if there is no bias (or conspiracy), then I'd expect to see doctored photos and news spin that are anti-terrorist, pro-US about 50% of the time.

Thing is, I don't.

5

Tom:

I agreed that the smoke plumes were photoshopped. I just suggested that it's not implausible that they got past an editor, especially one who sees hundreds of photos a day and wasn't specifically looking for fraud. As for the duped building, there's a similarity (they are both squarish buildings with horizontal shadows between floors), but the supposedly duped image is very blurry; and again, it makes no sense to clone that building - what kind of "propaganda" could it be?

As for editors, photos are not "sourced" the way news stories are. You don't get two quotes to support a photo. A photographer takes it and it purports to be a clear record of the scene on that site - unless there's reason to suspect fraud, you would treat it as real. And with dozens of photos of each event, and dozens of events per day to sift through, it doesn't surprise me that a photo with some - even fairly obvious - digital retouching would slip past. I suspect photo editors will become more skeptical now, but, like feature editors with Jason Blair, they had to get burned first by an outright fraud before they adopt a default position that all photos might be frauds.

Note, too, that if we accepted every LGF complaint as grounds for rejecting certain types of photos as "propaganda", many famous news photos would never get printed:

- the Iwo Jima flagraising (it was the second flag, raised the day after the hill was taken, to replace the first that was already up; the photographer went along specifically to shoot a picture of an event he already knew was going to occur)
- Robert Capa's D-Day pictures (they're blurry because the film was damaged in processing - some of their drama is thus artificial)
- every political handshaking photo (staged)
- MacArthur coming ashore in the Philippines (a staged re-enactment - both MacArthur and the photographers knowingly participated in a fake event)
- every photo ever shot of George Patton (Liberace was less publicity-conscious)
- every photo of a President golfing or fishing (staged)
- Marilyn Monroe with her white skirt flying up (staged over a ventilator grate with a fan blowing)
- George Bush in front of Mt. Rushmore/on an aircraft carrier/in his temporary, part-time National Guard jet/on his ranch/speaking English (egregiously faked)
- every photo from an "embedded" photographer in Iraq (staged by US handlers with the press's cooperation)

Where are we going to draw the line?

6

Boonton and Kevin Keith:

Polly, meet Anna. Anna, Polly. :)

7

Kevin, you forgot one:

-Bill Clinton crying on the beach at Normandy, stooping to fix a fallen cross setup moments earlier by an aide

8

Bryan,

Your point really is the one that those like Kevin and Boonton must provide an answer for. When unintentional oversights or mistakes all slant in one direction isn't that a pretty overwhelming case for the bias of the media?? When you flip a quarter 100 times and get heads 92 times, something might be up.

9

Part of the problem in all of this is that the news agencies do not have long-term vetted employees who are not natives of the areas they are covering doing the reporting/photographing. They line up stringers "to do the jobs that Americans won't do." (Oops! Wrong hot-button issue!)

They obviously can't or won't vet their stringers to be neutral about their coverage. So you end up with al-Reuters and the others shilling for the terrorists.

10

Kevin

Sure, some photos are faked, but some of your examples, such as press opportunities, are not intended to fool anyone. Everyone knows what's going on. Your example of MacArthur is a good one, as is Bryan's of Bill Clinton's utterly fake tears at Normandy. (And we've all seen that footage of Clinton leaving Ron Brown's funeral laughing and joking until he sees the cameras, then he's instantly in mourning mode.)

But my main point is you misunderstood what happened with the flag raising on Iwo Jima. The first flag was raised and the image captured by Bill Genaust, a Marine combat correspondent. But the Navy ships offshore couldn't see the flag well enough, so the Marines were ordered to raise a larger one. If you look at the Genaust photos, available on the Leatherneck magazine web site or a simple Google search, you'll see it's a pretty small flag. Abe Rosenthal was the only civilian photographer on Mt. Suribachi that day, and when he was told that another, larger flag was going to be raised, he decided to hang around to photograph it. That image was notstaged, though, if you look at the corresponding moving picture footage of the same event. It was spontaneous, and Rosenthal happened to be at the right time at the right place. His image was published first and therefore became the iconic image (although technically it's better than Genausts's anyway) because his film did not have to go through military channels as did the that of the Marine combat correspondents.

11

Tom: "utterly faked tears"? If I said that you feel utter contempt for Bill Clinton, would I be right? How do I know? I can't read your mind.

Among other things, Clinton said at Normandy:
"They may walk with a little less spring in their step, and the ranks are growing thinner, but let us never forget, when they were young, these men saved the world."

12

A couple of months ago, CNN online had two pics of the head of Iran. In one he had a raised fist. In the other a very western peace expression with his hand. The peace expression was too bright, from my perspective as a photographer, and so didn't fit the image. Does anyone have a take on this?

Collin

http://evangelicalperspective.blogspot.com

13

BTW, any serious "true" :0 photographer can see this image, as excellent as it is, as a digital painting instead of a photo. How?
1. Lack of color depth.
2. Curves are unrealistically smooth. Esp. around/above the left eye.
3. Lack of "fabric" both in the cloth of the hat and in the skin surface.
4. DOF. That basic photographic principle. The hair on the back/right is correctly softened as being out of focus, but the edge of the hat has contrast, placing it a different relationship to the CofC. That's a phyisical impossibility. (any photog who would retouch to get that effect would be making a serious mistake.)
5. Contrast. The flowers on the hat are too flat. There's not enough contrast, and they're again too sharp for their position relative to the "film plane".

Given the facilities of the digital darkroom, it would be possible, even simple, to take a photo and apply these changes, and others, to make a photo appear to be of another art. But we could second-guess all day.

Collin

http://evangelicalperspective.blogspot.com

14

Collin

All excellent points. I noticed none of them until you pointed them out. (I have a less-than-spiffy monitor and even less-spiffy eyes.) Notice also the color blending in the middle of her neck toward the front of her throat.

To dm, no, I don't have contempt for Bill Clinton. I just skeptical of all politicians. Don't forget those words Clinton spoke were likely written by a speech writer, as were Reagan's at Normandy in 1984. Reagan was just a better actor.

15

Tom,

Even more importantly:

1) What will happen in photojournalism when these skills reach the publication's digital darkroom?

2) Any photo editor who looks @ thousands of photos per day would easily see what I see.
And even more easily in the clearly-docotored
pics that have been publicized via the blogs.

Collin

16

Joe, I don't think that Boorstein is saying what you say he is. Imagery certainly can lead us to a world of blurs, but it can also help us to actually see an aspect of reality that we otherwise might miss. Likewise, manipulation of a photo isn't always fraud. It depends on the purpose of the manipulation and how it's done.

Any attempt to represent anything will fall short of actual reality, of course, but is the representation really trying to picture reality? (in photojournalism, I mean. Art is a different animal.) Or is it an attempt to communicate, as best as possible, what that reality was like?

Photography is a medium with inherent limitations, including those of the photographer. Any medium has such limitations. Even the most skillful and honest attempt to relate an occurrance in words will fall short, because the event must be interpreted by the writer, and the reader must interpret his words.

A good photographer will skillfully use the nature of the medium to best get his subject across. This can be difficult. I myself might, for example, digitally bump up the color of a flower in a photograph, but this is because the lighting conditions (or whatever) didn't allow the color to be captured as I saw it. I enhance the image in order to compensate.

Sometimes I may bump it up a little extra, but not for the purpose of deception; I mean to call attention to the wonder of the color of the flower or the way it is set off against another element of the photograph -- i.e., whatever I was prompted to try to capture in the first place.

17

Joe:

Interesting post, and on a timely issue.

First, context: the PURPOSE of the photos in question, in the wider context of the news coverage, was to present the false impression that Beirut was wide-area bombed and devastated by Israeli jets, when in fact the recent sat image will show that as we should expect [Israel does not have a heavy bomber force capable of carpet bombing on the required scale, and has a moral commitment to avoid unecessary civilian losses] there was highly specific targetting of a very few sites specifically asspociated with the terrorist group – functionally, Iran's Revolutionary Gurds' Foreign Legion, in the Iranian colony carved out of Lebanon, that initiated hostilities July 12 by launching a rocket campaign against the civilian population of northern Israel, then raiding across the internationally regognised boundary – nbased on a fictitious claim to an enclave over the border in question – and killing 8 soldiers and kidnapping two more.

But when we understand that the news feeds are dominated by two highly biased, UK-based entities, namely APTN and Reuters [even BBC's TV feeds largely come from these], then it all makes sense. BTW, these entities also control a lot of the key footage and under terms that make them disappear after the first two weeks or so – that's why certain inconvenient images vanish after the first flurry of news and debate.

LGF is the blog with the track record of hitting Dan Rather real hard by putting up a GIF animation of a plain vanilla Mac Word doc over the "TANG memos" that eventually cost Mr Rather his job.

From the discussions I have seen, there is reason to believe that he has depth of background in thge relevant fields of digital technology and in particular associated programming. So, it is not just an amateur's opinion on the pics in question.

As to the bias issue, if KTK and others don't notice it -- BBC is perhaps the worst on the current issue, but there is a clear pattern on this and many other issues, then I think it is a case of failing to recognise what lines up with one's own inclinations as being biased.

It is time for some real serious reflection on just how much we can be manipulated through words and images that LOOK real enough or SOUND plausible. Here I am of course alluding to the Apostle Paul:

RO 1:18 The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness, 19 since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. 20 For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities--his eternal power and divine nature--have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.

RO 1:21 For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. 22 Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools 23 and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like mortal man and birds and animals and reptiles.

(Hint: your friendly local museum of natural history is a case of "photoshopping" on steroids, often in 3-D . . .)

Down that road lies not only a lot of technical stuff but also some serious philosophy. I think my notes here on empirical evidence and the due balance of critical but open-minded willingness to trust credible sources provisionally, will be of help. Simon Greenleaf rules!

My rule of thumb on issues linlked to the Middle East: unless you can explain readily and accurately and in context the meaning of the cluster: 1919, Chaim Weismann, and Feisal Hussein, then you do not know enough to competently handle what is going on. [Glance here. On this one, much of the media is living in denial and applyig in an ill-informed way the West-as-oppressor template. To see why that is so, read Quran 9:29 - 31, and observe the universal scope of the command to fight, defeat and subjugate. Then look at the history of islam over the past 1400 years and in that light the map here [HT: why, LGF of course!] and observe who sponsored it: the research dept of the Muslim World Mission . . . ]

Grace, open our eyes

GEM

18

What an amazingly real looking photo! The bad news about this is that this sort of thing opens the door for "pseudo-child porn" as a so-called victimless crime.

When brings me to my reason for posting here. There's a just-completed survey suggesting that Swedish youth may be rejecting their parents free-swinging sexuality. Here's the blog link:

http://digg.com/world_news/Most_Swedish_Youth_Support_Porn_Ban/blog

Here's what it says:

"Swedish views on free-swinging sexuality may be changing. In a just-released survey, 55% of young Swedes between the ages of 18 and 21 support a ban on pornography, with 34% of the young women supporting a complete ban and 67% supporting a some legal prohibitions."

Those who visit Digg.com know that users can vote a story like this on to the main page, which probably has hundreds of thousands of viewers who need to see it. So if you'd like that fact to be better known and not suppressed by the mainstream media, go to the address above and vote for it.

Thanks!

19

Undoubtedly,there are many persons interested in denaturing the reality. Nowadays, the methods for editing photos are various permitting the change of the photos' aspect.

20

Hi Mike:

this sort of thing opens the door for "pseudo-child porn" as a so-called victimless crime.

Now, I didn't make THAT connexion for fauxtography. Serious point!

Gordon