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Reuters Admits, Pulls Doctored Photos
fragmentate points to a post on PopPhoto which says "Reuters pulled a photograph of burning buildings in Beirut yesterday after a post on the Little Green Footballs blog outed it as digitally manipulated. The photo, filed on Saturday by freelance photographer Adnan Hajj, ran with the caption "Smoke billows from burning buildings destroyed during an overnight Israeli air raid on Beirut's suburbs."
Fragmentate adds "Another image from the same photographer was found to have been doctored.
Whether you're a CNN fan, or a FoxNEWS fan, you have to wonder how much of what we see is fake, or exaggerated."
Believe it or not there are still a few honest sources for news. CBC is a good source, and have for many many years reported both sides of the conflict between Israel and Palestine. Fox on the other hand has a serious bias, which is sad and a dis-service to genuine news reporters.
An exploration of mixology, spirits and bartending.
Reuters says it normally sends all photos to their Singapore office to check for manipulation but this one slipped through. Looks bad but not quite the same level of deception as the hack who put Kerry and Fonda in the same photo during the last election cycle.
I don't read your sig. Why are you reading mine?
This is a bit ingenuous. Even before digital photo manipulation, a clear distinction was recognized between standard darkroom manipulations to adjust brightness, contrast, and color, and "trick photography" such as double exposures (which is analogous with what the photographer was doing with the Photoshop clone tool).
The bad photoshop work isn't really the story here. It's just what got him fired from Reuters. In one example and yet another, this photographer is acting more as a Hezbollah propaganda operative than a news photographer. He was responsible for one of the most used photos from Qana with the dead child being held up, and as recently as yesterday had a picture on Page 1 of the NYT of an injured Lebonese civilian. He's basically the Peter Parker of Lebanon. It's wouldn't be hard to get the best photos if you were working with the terrorists who control the region!
You are talking about the first. This is editorial work and damages the truth only to the extent that editing the stutters and stammers out of a spoken statement.
We are seeing examples of the second and third, which are like falsifying sources and, well, lying.
This is not my sandwich.
There are lots of levels of manipulation:
* Telling people where to stand and how to look - posing the photo - adding props.
* Framing the original photo to leave out things that spoil the story.
* Lying about when the photo was taken, where it was taken. Distorting the facts of what we are seeing.
* Brightness/Contrast/Gamma settings
* Colour adjustment
* Cropping - not really any different from framing the photo in the first place.
* Cleaning up speckles.
* Taking out distracting objects that don't affect the meaning of the photo.
* Taking out objects to change the meaning of the photo.
* Blurring company logos.
* Painting in whole new objects (like the smoke in the Reuters images).
There is a whole spectrum of 'manipulation' - some before the photo is taken, some in the camera, some outside the camera and some even just in how the photo is captioned.
It's a hard call as to where to place the limits.
Some of the Reuters photos that have recently exposed clearly exceed all reasonable limits of behavior - others don't. The most outrageous thing is how ineptly these were documented - it sends the message "You guys are complete idiots who'll believe even this low grade manipulation."
www.sjbaker.org
(I'd be much obliged if someone could tell me where that quote came from.)'
'In war, truth is the first casualty.' Aeschylus
'All warfare is based on deception.' Sun Tzu
'Among the calamities of war may be jointly numbered the diminution of the love of truth, by the falsehoods which interest dictates and credulity encourages.' Samuel Johnson
'The first casualty when war comes is truth.' Hiram Johnson (US Senator)
... and others
Great minds think alike; fools seldom differ.
The general public in Lebanon is to blame.
Lots of them actually support taking shots at Israel. The people who don't support that have still allowed it to occur.
I know, it's easy for me to say that the people in Lebanon should have put Hezbolla in jail or executed the whole lot of them. There isn't a one politician over there who dares to take a strong stand against the bastards.
But yet... a nation is responsible for keeping such things in check. Each and every person has a duty to keep the gangs under control. When this is not done, somebody else will come in and do the job.
If you let the criminals operate out of your house, don't complain when you get raided.
# Sort of like the way the fake 60 Minutes article on Bush's little vacation from the Air National Guard was placed by a GOP operative trying to smear CBS and Dan Rather.
Well, he's certainly not alone in this theory, and it is consistent with what Rove is known to have done to Alan Dixon, John McCain, and many others.
Well, I can't say with 100% certainty that this didn't happen, but the problem I have with this is that it relies totally on CBS to "do the right thing". Suppose CBS decided they didn't like President Bush and facts be damned, he had to go. Next they steadfastly insist that the documents are authentic and trump out some paid off "experts" to validate them, leaving the Republicans to argue that the docs are made up. It then gets into a "he said/she said" thing where Bush and his staffers can't totally disprove that the docs aren't made up without admitting that they placed them to begin with, so they have to waste precious time and resources defending against a lie they started secretly. I'm just not sure I can go down this path with you on this one.
# and they're morally deformed enough to try to smear the patriotism of a triple amputee war hero.
His name was Max Clealand, and they did just what he said.
I actually live in the state of Georgia, so I can comment on this one. The Washington Post is known for it's left leaning views, so I'm not sure I would bring this out as an "unbiased" source. Cleland was his own worst enemy. Actually this vote, stupid as it was, was not what did him in. Cleland was beaten because of his slavish devotion to the Democratic Party. The Dems opposed a bill creating the Department of Homeland Security because it contained provisions that weakened job protections (think "unions") in the new department. Since the Dems are the party that backs labor unions, opposing such language in the bill was consistent with their viewpoint. Fellow Georgia Democratic Senator Zell Miller has stated that he told Cleland repeatedly that if he voted against the bill, it would cost him the election in the fall. Cleland, always a true soldier of the Democratic Party and never one to differ from the party line, told Miller that he didn't know what he was talking about. So Cleland voted against the bill, just as the Democratic Party told him to do. Much ado was made about this in the fall campaign and it basically became impossible for Cleland to justify why he was "against America's security", so he lost. Cleland was not a particularly good senator and he paid the price for putting the party first above all. Like it or not, Miller was right and this was simply not a bill you could justify voting against and Cleland paid the price. The article link in the Washington Post refers to another incident that while it did not help Cleland, was not directly responsible for his loss.
Your definition of terrorism is over simplistic.
Initiating conflicts, intentionally targeting civilians, intentionally putting civilians in harms way = terrorism.
Guatemalan assasinations
CIA wrote the book on targeting civilan targets and using "martyrs". The manual recommended "selective use of violence for propagandistic effects" and to "neutralize" (i.e., kill) government officials. Nicaraguan Contras were taught to lead:
"demonstrators into clashes with the authorities, to provoke riots or shootings, which lead to the killing of one or more persons, who will be seen as the martyrs; this situation should be taken advantage of immediately against the Government to create even bigger conflicts."
The manual also recommended:
"Carefully selected, planned targets -- judges, police officials, tax collectors, etc. -- may be removed for PSYOP effect in a UWOA [unconventional warfare operations area]."
Wrote the book on torture (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torture_manuals)
And don't forget that we put Sadam in power. and trained that pesky Afganistan freedom fighter named bin Laden
Guess what? Karl Rove is not a political evil genius. He isn't even that good at what he does. He lets too many attacks and assumptions about the President go unchallenged. Your posts are a great example of this. Take this paragraph, for example:
Lets take a look at the inventions here that you are trying to pass off as fact. Everything about the memos was contested. There isn't a shred of evidence to prove the assertion that George Bush disobeyed a direct order or was AWOL from his obligations in the National Guard. These memos where the only thing that supposedly proved this, and they turned out to be fake.
Of course he did! He has denied the accusations that he didn't fulfill his obligations with the National Guard, and this is backed up by the fact that he had completed more than the required flying hours and was honorably discharged from service.
In this case, the only people that would know were dead.
See, if Karl Rove was a good political strategist, let alone the evil super-genius that you believe he is, people like you wouldn't still be spreading baseless rumors about his National Guard service around as fact.
"The defense of freedom requires the advance of freedom" - George W Bush