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Blogstorm on altered picture

This weekend several bloggers reported the strange alteration on a picture of a photographer picturing Beirut.Today the news hits big in mainstream media, when Reuters apologized.

LONDON, Aug 6 (Reuters) - Reuters, the global news and information agency, told a freelance Lebanese photographer on Sunday it would not use any more of his pictures after he doctored an image of the aftermath of an Israeli air strike on Beirut.

The photograph by Adnan Hajj, which was published on news Web sites on Saturday, showed thick black smoke rising above buildings in the Lebanese capital after an Israeli air raid in the war with the Shi'ite Islamic group Hizbollah, now in its fourth week.

Reuters withdrew the doctored image on Sunday and replaced it with the unaltered photograph after several news blogs said it had been manipulated using Photoshop software to show more smoke.

Reuters has strict standards of accuracy that bar the manipulation of images in ways that mislead the viewer.

"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," said Moira Whittle, the head of public relations for Reuters.

"This represents a serious breach of Reuters' standards and we shall not be accepting or using pictures taken by him," Whittle said in a statement issued in London.

So we won't be seeing this one...

(credit: Adnan Hajj, Photoshop, and Jewlicious)

More evidence of photoshopping and misleading captions by the same photographer, here and here and here

It is very good to see people react to manipulated pictures.
In the end one could say the picture of the woman doesn't matter since it could have been another woman screaming.
But it does matter.

I had huge discussions on the matter back in Israel with Western 'so called' journalists, who really did the same.
Awful to know..

Technorati Tags: photo manipulation, beirut