The make believe business

It happened before, remeber the LA Times first page soldier pict? And US Today's Condi?

And in Venezuela, the kings of low ethical behavior also have contributed to this genre here and here.

Really disgusting and unethical. Yes folks, this are the times we live in. Anything goes for a Pulitzer, or for character assesination, or to make believe that someone is popular. (I wonder if a 3rd world dictator is sooo popular as he claims he is, why the need to manipulate images of his meetings...)

And, the sad thing is that technology will deliver to us soon the day when it will be impossible to detect real images, video, sound, etc, from doctored ones but by extensive research... So we would have to turn our backs to news, images etc... It would be impossible to trust into anything or anyone. How overwhelmingly crazy is that.

Reuters drops Lebanese photographer over doctored image

LONDON (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.

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

He was among several photographers from the main international news agencies whose images of a dead child being held up by a rescuer in the village of Qana, south Lebanon, after an Israeli air strike on July 30 have been challenged by blogs critical of the mainstream media's coverage of the Middle East conflict.

Reuters and other news organizations reviewed those images and have all rejected allegations that the photographs were staged.