Daily Alert Archives

Lebanon Photos: Take a Closer Look

[Los Angeles Times] Tim Rutten - The controversy over Reuters' distribution of digitally manipulated, falsely labeled, and - probably - staged photos of the fighting in Lebanon hasn't been nearly as large as it should have been. After Charles Johnson, a Los Angeles-based blogger who operates the website Little Green Footballs, exposed digitally altered photographs by Lebanese freelance photographer Adnan Hajj, Reuters killed the manipulated images, fired Hajj, and removed 920 of his photos from its digital archives. Many photos, including grisly images from the Qana tragedy, clearly are posed for maximum dramatic effect. There is an entire series of photos of children's stuffed toys poised atop mounds of rubble. All are miraculously pristinely clean and apparently untouched by the devastation they purportedly survived. There's an improbable photo by Hajj of a Koran burning atop the rubble of a building supposedly destroyed by an Israeli aircraft hours before. Nothing else in sight is alight. In other photos, the same wrecked building is portrayed multiple times with the same older woman either lamenting its destruction or passing by in different costumes.
2006-08-14 01:00:00
Full Article