By: Daryl Lang, Photo District News In the past week, critics writing online have challenged the accuracy of several news photos from Lebanon, forcing news agencies to correct photo captions and, in one case, fire a photographer.
News agencies have corrected a few obvious errors and deny that their photographers would participate in covering staged events.
Other stories from Lebanon, including photojournalists who say conditions are so dire they have had to rescue elderly and disabled people themselves, describe plenty of authentic damage and suffering to be seen there.
Some of the criticism has been the result of misunderstandings (for example, about time stamps) or speculation. Other cases, such as the accusation that rescue efforts in Qana, Lebanon, on July 30 were staged for journalists, remain uncertain.
If Hezbollah members are indeed staging rescue scenes, it would hardly be the first time one side of a conflict has tried to spin the media. Government and militia groups in every corner of the world know the power of a photograph, and arrange for photojournalists to witness events that cast them favorably. War journalists have long grappled with the ethics of covering demonstrations and other actions that might only be happening in their presence. Getting accurate and compelling pictures out of a conflict zone is a dangerous job, and journalists often must travel in groups for safety.
What makes this conflict different is how amateur media critics, seasoned by years of reviewing coverage of the Iraq war, are scanning the news wires in search of anything suspicious. Typically, they comb through the low-resolution images from the major photo wires that are available for free on Yahoo! News.
Reuters freelance photographer Adnan Hajj remains the most significant takedown for the bloggers. Hajj was blamed for digitally manipulating two photos from Lebanon, the first of which was spotted by a blogger on Saturday. Reuters said this week it would no longer work with Hajj and yanked hundreds of his images from its archive.
The web site of the BBC later pulled a wire service photo of a grieving woman after bloggers revealed the same woman appeared in a photo taken weeks earlier.
"We weren't in a position to get to the bottom of this ourselves, so we decided to update the picture with a different, more recent image," BBC web editor Steve Herrmann told The New York Post.
The New York Times corrected a caption in an online slide show after bloggers, notably one at Gateway Pundit, spotted a man who appeared to be both a rescuer and a victim.
The photos, by Times staffer Tyler Hicks, show a shirtless man participating in a rescue effort in Tyre, Lebanon. In one photo, someone who looks like the same man is seen trapped under debris while another man helps him. The original caption, which spoke generally about the scene, implied that the man was among those killed in an Israeli attack.
The Times corrected the caption and said the man was injured while helping in the rescue. An accurate caption ran in the print edition of the Times, the paper said.
Bloggers flagged another Reuters photo as suspicious because it looked similar to the two that showed the same woman crying, and because it was credited to Hajj. Reuters said the photo was in fact by Kobeisi, but was credited wrong. A writer for a blog called The Jawa Report floated a theory that Hajj and Kobeisi are the same person, based on comparisons of their work. Reuters said they are two photographers who sometimes travel to the same scenes together.
More examinations of Hajj's work, including a dramatic photo of flames near the Beirut airport that was published on the cover of the July 24 Newsweek, have turned up no further examples of obvious manipulation.
A Reuters spokesperson did not return a call Thursday asking for an update on the agency's review of Hajj's other photos.
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