Angry in the Great White North

Reuters has been caught in an embarrassing situation.

No, scratch that. Reuters is in a crisis situation that, if there was any integrity left in the media today, could lead to the dissolution of the news service.

Reuters has admitted that one of its photographers, Adnan Hajj, has altered an image:

This now famous image shows clear evidence of the smoke columns and buildings being electonically cloned.

Here is Reuter's explanation:

"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 is obviously crap. Those buildings were not cloned, then shifted down and to the right, blurred, colour-corrected, had their edges feathered and so on, in the process sitting in a dark room and removing a mote of dust.

Worse yet, it appears that there have been other such faked photos.

Reuters leaves open the question of whether that explanation is credible. Reuters is careful to not offer an opinion. I suppose that would be editorializing, and Reuters does not spin the news.

Right.

An honest examination of the situation would require a determination of the motivation behind the extensive reworking of the photograph, how such a photograph made it past the editors (especially given the amateurish quality of the work), and, most importantly, whether that motivation played a role in getting the photograph through.

In other words, was the photograph altered in order to make Israel look bad, and is this consistent with an agenda Reuters is pursuing?

From the Thornburgh/Boccardi Report on Memogate, when CBS allowed Dan Rather to present a story designed to destory George W Bush's re-election campaign that within hours of airing was roundly denounced as being based on faked documents:

The Panel is aware that some of ascribed political motivations to 60 Minutes Wednesday's decision to air the September 8 Segment just two months before the political election, while others further found political bias in the program itself. The Panel reviewed this issue and found certain actions that could support such charges. However, the Panel cannot conclude that a political agenda at 60 Minutes Wednesday drove either the timing of the airing of the Segment or its content.

The Panel comes close, then pulls away from stating the obvious -- a crappy piece of journalism made it through the process designed to filter garbage out because the filters themselves had become politicized, or the function of the filters had been fatally compromised by the political agenda of powerful factions within CBS:

The Panel finds that in the rush to air, and with the Rathers/Mapes team producing the Segment, some valid questions raised were pushed aside instead of probed. Issues remained outstanding and the Segment was not ready for air on September 8. Nevertheless, a vetting session was held that day and some of the right questions were asked of Mapes. Mapes answered all the questions and left the vetters with the impression that everything was solid. Given her reputation and stature, and the rush to air, none of the vetters pressed Mapes to get the detailed answers they needed before approving the Segment.

Luckily for CBS, the network could hide behind the excuse that Dan Rather and Mary Mapes were extremely powerful figures in the news organization.

Can Reuters make the same argument? Hardly. Indeed Reuters minimizes Adnan Hajj's links to news service:

Hajj worked for Reuters as a non-staff freelance, or contributing photographer, from 1993 until 2003 and again since April 2005.

So if Adnan Hajj was not a power to be feared within Reuters as Dan Rather was within CBS, how did such a lousy piece of photo-journalism get through the vetting process? Was it just incompetence? Or something worse?

Is the vetting process taking place within an environment in which an anti-Israel agenda is the norm. In a shocking development, it seems that such an agenda is not just pursued by Reuters, but violently pursued:

A Reuters employee has been suspended after sending a death threat to an American blogger.

The message, sent from a Reuters internet account, read: "I look forward to the day when you pigs get your throats cut."

It was sent to Charles Johnson, owner of the Little Green Footballs (LGF) weblog, a popular site which often backs Israel and highlights jihadist terrorist activities.

In the threat, the Reuters staff member, who has not been named, left his email address as "zionistpig" at hotmail.com.

The email was traced back to Reuters. Another freelancer? I think not.

Via Michelle Malkin:

An insider sends word that one organizational problem inside Reuters stems from layoffs of seasoned photo staff from the London and Washington picture desks, which used to police images from their regions and send to other regions for vetting before distributing them to clients. Apparently, those functions were all transferred to a central editing desk in Singapore.

Incompetence or a disgruntled Muslim employee drawn from the sizable Muslim population of Singapore, with little supervision from management uncritical of anything that paints Israel in a bad light?

Can Reuters ever be trusted again to deliver news, and not use clients as a means of promoting a particular point of view? Should clients worry that a Reuters employee is going to threaten them if they don't toe the Reuters line? Should clients worry that carrying material provided by Reuters will expose them to accusations of bias?

These are questions that need to be asked by every major news organization that pays money to Reuters to use the news service's photographs and newswire reports. These organizations could make the point that they have been victimized by Reuters. Their credibility has been damaged by this fiasco as well.

If the news organizations want to repair the damage done, the first thing they have to do is to go after Reuters with every journalistic and legal tool at their disposal until Reuters comes clean. Assuming Reuters can survive the process. Assuming it deserves to.

It is just as likely that Reuters will forever be as mistrusted a news source as, well, CBS, and nothing will ever fix that. Not even an army of Katie Courics snapping photos.

If that's the case, news organizations should consider taking their business elsewhere.