Smoke appearing in the sky, a divine resurrection on the rocks, duplicating missiles…
… Truly, Photogate is a spiritual thing.
The New York Times excuses Reuter’s fraudulent pictures…
…Then confesses to its own fraud!
From Todays New York Times:
Bloggers Drive Inquiry on How Altered Images Saw Print
The matter has created an uproar on the Internet, where many bloggers see an anti-Israel bias in Mr. Hajj’s manipulations, which made the damage from Israeli strikes into Beirut appear worse than the original pictures had. One intensified and replicated plumes of smoke from smoldering debris. In another, he changed an image of an Israeli plane to make it look as if it had dropped three flares instead of one.
…Still, Reuters officials said they were unaware that any American newspapers had run the two pictures in question, although dozens of papers, including The New York Times, have printed his pictures over the years.
The Times, which ran a picture of his as recently as Saturday on its front page, has published eight of Mr. Hajj’s Associated Press and Reuters photographs since March 2005. Times editors said a review of those pictures found none that appeared to have been changed improperly.
Still, his activities have heightened the anxiety photo editors are already experiencing in the age of digital photography, when pictures can be so easily manipulated by computer.
These advances, made broadly available to the public and professional photographers alike through Photoshop or similar software, may have made readers more skeptical of what they see in newspapers.
Then on the corrections page we see beneath the photo of Maureen Dowd:
A picture caption with an audio slide show on July 27 about an Israeli attack on a building in Tyre, Lebanon, imprecisely described the situation in the picture. The man pictured, who had been seen in previous images appearing to assist with the rescue effort, was injured during that rescue effort, not during the initial attack, and was not killed.
The correct description was this one, which appeared with that picture in the printed edition of The Times: After an Israeli airstrike destroyed a building in Tyre, Lebanon, yesterday, one man helped another who had fallen and was hurt. (Go to Interactive Feature)
So, what explains this photo fake phenomena?
Stressed out photo editors? Divine interventions? Or, just stinking bias?
You make the call.
YNET has more on the story.
