Tricks of the trade

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:

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."

One photographer, Brian Denton, acknowledged the problem: "I have been working in Lebanon since all this started, and seeing the behavior of many of the Lebanese wire service photographers has been a bit unsettling. . . . I have been witness to the daily practice of directed shots, one case where a group of wire photogs were choreographing the unearthing of bodies, directing emergency workers here and there, asking them to position bodies just so, even remove bodies that have already been put in graves so that they can photograph them in people's arms. These photographers have come away with powerful shots that required no manipulation digitally, but instead, manipulation on a human level, and this itself is a bigger ethical problem."

Columnist Dave Kopel, writing in the Rocky Mountain News, presented other vignettes of Hezbollah propagandists at work: "While carrying the bodies on a short path where the photographers are clustered, they wail copiously and cry in anguish, holding up the corpses for display. Before and after the 'camera run,' they display little emotion and treat the children's bodies callously. They make sure one rescuer completes his camera run before the next rescuer leaves the building for his own camera run. . . . While an interview is taking place, a couple of men carrying a body on a stretcher come around a corner; they set the stretcher down and wait for photographers to get in position before they pick up the stretcher and resume walking forward."

Tim Rutten of the Los Angeles Times acknowledged the problem: Many photos "clearly are posed for maximum dramatic effect. There is an entire series of photos of children's stuffed toys poised atop mounds of rubble. All are miraculously pristinely clean and apparently untouched by the devastation they purportedly survived. (Reuters might want to check its freelancers' expenses for unexplained Toys R Us purchases.)"

Press organizations have commonly taken a hard line against photo manipulation. Last month The Charlotte Observer fired a photographer for changing the color of the sky in a picture of firefighters, and three years ago the Los Angeles Times also terminated an employee for photo manipulation in Iraq. But the response of press lords to the Lebanon revelations has been largely defensive so far, and some photographers have closed ranks. One photog, Damon Lee Perry, noted that many of his colleagues "don't wish to even entertain the thought that Hezbollah and their jihadi friends would dare commit fraud/media manipulation."

Others say that photographers have to keep Hezbollah happy to gain access to sites; if they don't have access they can't shoot and then sell their photographs; if they don't sell they don't eat. As CNN's Nic Robertson said last month, "Hezbollah has very, very sophisticated and slick media operations . . . [and] control over its areas in the south of Beirut. . . . You don't get in there without their permission."

Still others say that stringers are competing for sales by producing photos more dramatic than real life brings them. That defense, though, raises questions about the gullibility of editors who forget the need to be skeptical about stories or photos that are too good to be true.

None of the Lebanon manipulation is brand new. A WORLD interview with author Stephanie Guttman detailed anti-Israel bias from 2000 to 2004 (see "Photographic negative," March 4, 2006). WORLD also reported that after Saddam Hussein's fall some journalists confessed their playing along with him to maintain Baghdad access-twisting the news to get "the news." Most recently, reports circulated of a 5-year-old Palestinian girl killed by an Israeli military strike-but doctors said she died after sustaining head injuries during a fall from a swing.

The deeper question some ask is whether these questions about manipulation should be primary: After all, the corpses generally are real (although in one case bloggers discovered a propagandist posing himself as a dead man and springing back to life moments after the shutters twitched). People in civilian clothes are dying (note, though, that terrorists rarely wear uniforms). Some innocent people, including children, have died-that is true-and if it takes a Mickey Mouse or a wedding dress to draw our attention to the bombings, so be it.

Some photographers have thought through questions of responsibility for those deaths. Daniel Etter wrote on one blog, "The real staging happens before the rescue worker shows the dead children to photographers. It happens when the Hezbollah builds [a] kindergarten right next to their positions."

Etter went on, though, to note that propaganda is common: "PR agencies fly to Kuwait just before the American troops arrive to distribute small American flags." But is that action morally equivalent to launching missiles next to a school? Rutten of the Los Angeles Times criticized Hezbollah's media control and noted "no similar flow of propagandistic images coming from the Israeli side of the border. That's because one side-the democratically elected government of Israel-views death as a tragedy and the other-the Iranian-financed terrorist organization Hezbollah-sees it as an opportunity."

Rutten noted that Hezbollah terrorists "use their own people as human shields," but "every Israeli civilian killed or injured was the victim of a terrorist attack intended to harm civilians. That alone ought to wash away any blood-stained suggestion of moral equivalency."

For additional evidence of photo manipulation, see articles and links on www.worldmagblog.com of Aug. 10, 11, and 14.