reuters photographer caught faking it by bloggers

Some of the more old school mainstream media types spend a lot of time worrying about the "blogger lynchmob" and if they keep making mistakes like this one, they’ve got every reason to be.

The photo at left, taken by Adnan Hajj for Reuters, appeared on Yahoo News and elsewhere with the description and by-line: "Smoke billows from burning buildings destroyed during an overnight Israeli air raid on Beirut’s suburbs August 5, 2006. Many buildings were flattened during the attack." REUTERS/Adnan Hajj

Little Green Footballs, one of the blogs that spotted the faked CBS memos that led to Rathergate, spotted something odd about the photo:

Notice the repeating patterns in the smoke; this is almost certainly caused by using the Photoshop “clone” tool to add more smoke to the image… Smoke simply does not contain repeating symmetrical patterns like this, and you can see the repetition in both plumes of smoke… But it’s not only the plumes of smoke that were “enhanced.” There are also cloned buildings.

Another blog, Left and Right, then posted an isolated section of the photo that very clearly shows cloned buildings repeating there way up from the left corner of the image.

Reuters ended up pulling the image, sacking the photographer and apologising publicly. According to Reuters, "the photographer has denied deliberately attempting to manipulate the image, saying that he was trying to remove dust marks and that he made mistakes due to the bad lighting conditions he was working under."

<< update >>

Reuters boss Paul Holmes reportedly told BBC’s Newsnight that:

"I welcome, and Reuters welcomes, the scrutiny we come under from bloggers. We will consider criticism from any source and we will take it seriously. I think it has to be said, as well, because of the blogging community many of the more egregious breaches of journalistic ethics have been exposed. It makes the media much more accountable and much more transparent."