Reuters: If you can’t trust their pictures; how can you trust their reporting?

Steve Yuhas

The Internet has proved its value again this week as a group of bloggers exposed a photo shot by a Reuters News Service photographer as a fraud. The photo was not just any photo and the photographer not just any photographer; rather, the photo was allegedly of damage done to Lebanon by Israeli military forces and the photographer, a Lebanese man named Adnan Hajj, a person that supplied other pictures to the news outlet to help turn world opinion against Israel in the most recent conflict.

Adding insult to injury another spectacle is going on behind the scenes at Reuters as it attempts to deflect attention away from the fact that one of their employees sent an anti-Semitic email to an Internet site (www.littlegreenfootballs.com). As of this writing the employee has not been named, but was suspended after Charles Johnson, the owner of the blog, was able to trace the email that said, “I look forward to the day when you pigs get your throats cut."

The question now becomes obvious: Reuters is one of the largest news organizations in the world with reporters and photographers all over the globe making reports and taking pictures to share with the world; how many of them have altered their photographs, made up their reporting or have such hate for Jews that they are willing to taint their coverage?

If photographs cannot be believed and Reuters obviously has a problem with anti-Semitism on their staff – how can they be believed in anything – especially the important issues facing the world?

All of this began when bloggers first noticed that pictures coming out of Beirut looked eerily similar to one another – not just because multiple people took pictures of the same thing, but because smoke plumes were exactly alike and buildings seemed to replicate themselves. Add to that the fact that the same corpses seemed to be showing up in newspapers all over the country and on television and any logical person would question how these things could happen.

Was it coincidence or an intentional decision to mislead people in order to influence public opinion over the events taking place in the Middle East?

The answer, of course, is obvious: pictures were doctored and corpses of children used and re-used in order to paint Israel as a nation of killers and Lebanon and her people as a nation of peace loving folks who just happened to vote Hezbollah into power without knowing their potential or previous connection to terrorism.

Blogging became well known and respectable after, during the 2004 presidential election, they made public the fact that CBS News used forged documents during a news story that showed President Bush shirked his duty as a National Guard pilot. After that blogging became serious as more and more stories were broke by bloggers who can trace their heritage back to Matt Drudge of the DrudgeReport.com – the man who made the blue dress and Monica Lewinsky a household name.

Now enter bloggers who have access not only to a computer, but access to the same software that can be used to alter photographs or to quickly call up audio, video or text to compare to others. There was a time when a mainstream media outlet like Reuters would never have been questioned and now bloggers are not only questioning them, but calling them to account when they’re found to have done something wrong. Blogging used to be looked at as a simple pajama clad pastime, but now – after this most recent media embarrassment by a group of bloggers – it has to be looked at as serious journalism and the mainstream media should pay attention.

A story of this magnitude breaking in the New York Times would make a person eligible for a Pulitzer, but what award do bloggers have to look forward to after showing that Reuters was not only distributing fraudulent photos, but had people on staff who have a vested interest in making sure these photographs and gross exaggerations of Israeli aggression make the front pages of newspapers across America?

Probably nothing, but I submit the bloggers of the nation have just taken a huge chunk out of the iceberg that was the mainstream media. It is one thing to expose an attempt to portray a sitting President of the United States as a draft dodger and to sway a close election, but it is quite another to not only doctor photos and video (or at least acquiesce to their distribution) of photos and film of what may very well be the most important issue facing the world today.

There is no doubt that some blogs are partisan places where anything one party does is good and the other party bad, but there are places where bloggers are only looking for the truth and it appears that in the case of LittleGreenFootballs.com, like the DrudgeReport.com, it has been found and the sad truth is that Reuters cannot be trusted to bring the news about the conflict in the Middle East to the world.

Reuters will have to take a long hard look at itself and do exactly what the New York Times did when it was taken in by some of her columnists: an audit of her pictures and stories as another photo is coming into question and other videos that feature the same rescuers and victims over and over are again being played for world consumption.

If Reuters does not take the time to review the work they have submitted to the world then the world should abandon Reuters as a relic of the previous era when news outlets were at least trustworthy and wanted to bring the story to the people. Instead – today – Reuters can accurately be painted as an outlet wanting to bring the story they want to bring and will do anything to bring it.

Even if it means faking photos and victims and not asking the questions about pictures that anyone familiar with off the shelf photo-editing software asked at a blog site in cyberspace.

Steve Yuhas is a radio talk show host on KOGO AM 600 in southern California. He may be reached at www.steveyuhas.com or steve@steveyuhas.com.