There is a simple solution to the problem: ANY manipulation of a photo by ANY means mechanical or digital, any staging or ‘creation’ of a scene, are grounds for immediate dismissal of the employee or termination of the freelancer. People who manipulate these images are not only lying to your readers and customers but are stealing from you — they are stealing your previously good reputation. You owe it to your readers your customers to ensure that these images reflect fact, not opinion — unless of course that’s your intent.

Beyond the poorly done Photoshopping of photos, what about all staged photos by Reuters stringers? I can go out now and find all sorts of pictures of building rubble in Lebanon with perfectly clean children’s toys sitting on top of the mess. When I see something like that, I know it’s a lie; it’s been staged.

“The Facts - Without Spin” says Reuters on NPR. Baloney!

To the contrary of the reader who now doesn’t trust Reuters-I continue to trust Reuters. You took steps to remove the doctored photo & all photos by the offending photographer from your data base promptly. There is a probability that an expericenced technician could have fooled the editor or editors who screened the offending photo. Reuters is taking steps to catch doctored photos. That is enough for me.
All of us are aware that clever technicians will continue to try to fool your photo editors for a myrid of reasons. That is human nature. To take steps to prevent fraud, report truthfully & fully, admit errors promptly is the nature & policy of Reuters.

in my opinion it is also bad practice that the media publish pictures with giving the readers the date and time of the taking of the picture

THERE IS NOTHING INHERENTLY WRONG with Photoshop usage on Photos, as long as strategies are agreed upon and checks to assure compliance.

Knowing the importance of a professional appearance on widely distibuted and perhaps achive photographs, it is perfectly acceptable to want to utilize the technology availble to make them as visually clear to the millions who will view them.

What practical reason is there for allowing a few bad apples ruining it for all conscientious professionals?

The blogs are buzzing with this story, but what I haven’t been able to understand is why wire agencies, such as Reuters, employ so many foreign national in-country stringers to report the news? In-country freelancers are paid less and must take far more risks than their Western colleagues. When something like this happens we blame the individual not the structural and instituitional systems in place that enable this type of problem.

Why did it take so long for Mr. Hajj to be discovered by a blogger?

Where were the editors in charge of the content?

The wire service, I think, has a responsibility here and must be held accountable for selecting and training individuals that are willing to follow commonly accepted ethical standards.

In some way, I do feel sorry for this guy. I feel sorry for him because he has become a scapegoat for an industry that has failed to make sure he wasn’t using the power of the camera and all the technology that goes with it to tell us lies.

How many other pictures are being manipulated every day that we don’t know about and who is ultimately responsible for allowing these images to slip through as representative of what can only be called a constructed social reality.

I often feel that journalistic practices today that are being driven by economic concerns. Journalism is increasingly a business run by businessmen.

With hundreds of well-trained photojournalists graduating from journalism program in this country why do agencies continue to rely on freelancers, who may or not have the same level of training?

The big picture issue here is more about the political-economics of doing business in times of war, than it is about one person’s journalistic integrity. Let’s get this straight.

One of the most important issues facing the media today is credibility, yet Western wire services continue to utilize labor practices that exploit people.

Shouldn’t wire services and the editors who work for them be held as equally accountable to the public as the photographer?

What needs to be discussed here is the reality that our wire services exploit freelancers who end up assuming all the risk of working in extremely dangerous situations. Consider for a moment the number of Iraqi journalists, many of them working for Western news agencies, that have died in the past four years. In-country photojournalists, be it in Iraq or Lebanon, risk their lives every day so that we can be better informed.

The reality of the situation is that these freelancers are typically paid far less than Western photojournalists, become targets of political reprisals, and are rarely covered by any sort of health insurance policy.

In this case, even if the freelancer is fired and all his or her pictures removed from circulation, the wire services will inevitably hire another freelancer with the same language, cultural, and technological skills to take his place.

Firing the freelancer is a knee-jerk, sort of “cover our butts”, reaction to a even more insidious situation that has been overlooked in the industry for decades. Outsourcing what is the equivalent of photo-mercenaries in order to save money and Western lives.

Freelancers need the same training, pay, educational opportunities, and health coverage as any other human being needs in this sort of situation. However, all of this costs money, and the bottom line in the news business these days is pretty much do news fast and do news cheap.

The message that Reuters is sending to the public by firing the freelancer is that they can be counted on to take care of individuals who make them look bad. I feel a deep sense of sadness for the freelancer who probably didn’t even know that he was doing anything wrong in the first place.

What needs to the discussed here is the bigger and meatier issue of how the wire services out source the most dangerous and difficult assignment to freelancers who are more or less treated like a disposable commodity.

Even though Reuters publicly apologized for the picture that got out, where were editors who cleared the image for distribution?

In this case, a first-grader could have done a better cloning job on the image, and at the end of the day it is the editors, not just the photographer, that have failed us.

What we need now is an honest discussion about the use of in-country hires and freelancers by media giant who exploit them in order to feed the beast that our insatiable appetite for images in this country has become.

We should not, in this case, be shooting the messenger (the freelancer), but rather the companies that fail to educate their content providers in understanding the importance of balanced, fair-minded, and ethical visual practices.

In response to Patrick’s questions above our Global Picture Desk handles approximately 1200 pictures per day on what is considered a normal news day. On a busy or breaking news type day the desk will handle up to about 2000 pictures. Of the total pictures sent to the desk from photographers all over the world, about 50 are not published to our wire on average each day. Usual reasons for a picture not to be published are photos that are out of focus or are repetitive in nature to what has already be transmitted on the wire.

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I have a lot of respect for the folks at Reuters for coming out and discussing this. I think it’s imperative that circumstances such as this, manipulation in recent months by photographer Patrick Schneider of the Charlotte Observer, and Brian Walski of the Los Angeles Times, who was fired for his composite image from the war, be used to make the point to the viewing public that these circumstances are not tolerated. While I think that most of the viewing public knows that photo manipulation is possible, they trust sources like Reuters, and others. Moreso, I think, when those they trust publically take those that violate their rules out to the woodshed, and act publicly to apologize.

One concern of mine, is how did this make it past a seasoned photo editor? Was this put out by a knowledgable editor who was overworked, or by an underpaid outsourced and inexperienced photo editor?

Lastly, among Reuters, AP, AFP, and others, how often has work that has been manipulated been sent in by photographers, and been caught by a photo editor, only to have them kill the photo and fire/ban the freelancer, without their manipulated photos making it onto the wire? I’d say that it’s happened more often than we know.

John

How many photographs do Reuters photo editors deal with in a given day? And what proportion are published?