Lebanon - Reuters' Image Problem

Nice to see this reported out in liberal land.

But even this story has been updated. The buildings in question were actually bombed even earlier on the 18th of July. So that would make it at least 3 times the photographs were used to dipict different bombings. When in fact it was one bombing.

Charles points out the section relevant to him but here's what's important to the bigger picture.

The real thrust of Johnson’s critique, in other words, is to raise the delicate question of who exactly we are entrusting our “news gathering” to. Johnson and other bloggers have been criticized for claiming that the deaths of 28 civilians following an Israeli bombing of a house in the Lebanese village of Qana were deliberately staged by Hezbollah. But photos by the ubiquitous Hajj played a prominent role in the coverage, as Reuters has conceded. Bloggers claim many of them look, if not staged, then extremely posed. Particularly notorious was the number of photographs featuring a mysterious, green-helmeted Lebanese aid worker who, among other duties, seemed willing to hold up dead babies for hours on end for anyone with a working camera.

Johnson disputes the notion that he has tried to pretend no one died in Qana or that the death of children isn’t unequivocally horrifying. “None of the points I was making were intended to minimize the deaths in Qana, which did happen,” he says. “But because images like that have such a powerful hold over human nature — they invoke the strongest emotions we have, to see children dead — if someone is manipulating those effects for propaganda purposes, it’s vital they be exposed, because it’s loathsome. But yes, no one wants the children to be dead, and I don’t minimize that at all. But to dance on their corpses in this ghoulish propaganda display is almost worse.”

Dancing on corpses? Ghoulish propaganda display? A leaked interoffice memo from the Associated Press, or AP, congratulating its Qana photographers on “a stunning series of images . . . that beat the competition and scored huge play overnight,” suggests that such phrases, as well as some of Johnson’s other charges, may not be entirely hyperbolic.

This last bit shows this reporter at least "gets it". Others, like the BBC, don't care because it fits their anti-Israeli and anti-American agenda.

In exposing Hajj’s manipulations, Johnson has raised the lid on a potential Pandora’s box. Namely, how our leading news agencies and newspapers increasingly rely on stringers from hostile nations to tell us how we, or our allies, behave in wartime. Since you’d be hard-pressed to find Muslims in the U.S., let alone Europe, who aren’t strongly anti-Israel and opposed to any American presence in the Middle East whatsoever, why on earth would you expect to find neutral Arab reporters in Baghdad or Beirut? This is the kind of question newspaper editors should be asking themselves (and their stringers). If the implications of this are followed through, or if more photographers like Adnan “Photoshop” Hajj are discovered, the ramifications are likely to be significant. In helping bring Hajj’s smoke-and-mirrors game to light, Johnson has performed a great service.

That's what us bloggers do.