Tricks of the trade

Middle East | How far does journalistic fraud extend in reporting from Lebanon? | Marvin Olasky

Early this month one press service, Reuters, fired one photographer, Adnan Hajj, for doctoring photos so as to turn a defensive flare fired by Israeli planes into multiple missile launches, and to make smoke over Beirut larger and darker. But as August wore on, bloggers found repeated instances of Hezbollah news manipulation and staging of scenes—and even some writers and photographers for mainstream media sounded the alarm.

Among the examples of staged photography by Reuters, the Associated Press, and Agence France Presse that journalism schools and traditional textbooks see as unethical:

  • Photos of bombing sites with clean and undamaged toys and stuffed animals perfectly positioned in front of them for maximum poignant impact. It's possible that Mickey Mouse and others merely sprung up at those spots, but it's much more likely that their placement was the product of intelligent design.
  • Photographers moving other objects to more readily jerk tears. For example, many media outlets displayed a photograph of a mannequin with a wedding dress standing near the site of an Israeli air raid—as if an explosion that knocked down a building a few yards away would leave a mannequin standing but unnoticed by hundreds of rescuers and media members running around earlier in the day.
  • Photos of "rescue workers" that are actually shots of propagandists repositioning bodies for maximum effect, parading around with corpses, and instructing photographers what to shoot.
  • Photos two weeks apart showing the same Lebanese woman bemoaning the destruction of her apartment by Israeli bombs. The photos show her in front of two different buildings, leading one blogger to write, "Either this woman is the unluckiest multiple home owner in Beirut, or something isn't quite right."
  • Photo recycling with captions indicating that they show fresh destruction. Reuters recycled a photo of one Beirut building destroyed on July 18 so that it was supposedly destroyed again on July 26 and again on August 5.

Newspapers used many such photos and so did major magazines. The cover of the July 31 edition of U.S. News and World Report had a photo captioned, "A Hezbollah gunman aims his AK 47 at a fire caused by an explosion in Kfarshima, near Beirut, Lebanon, Monday, July 17, 2006." The magazine suggested that the explosion came from a shot-down Israeli aircraft hitting the ground. But bloggers showed that the photo was of tires burning in a garbage dump after a misfired Hezbollah missile hit them. An accurate caption would have read, "A Hezbollah PR man points a rifle for dramatic effect at a tire fire."