A day after firing a freelance Lebanese photographer for doctoring an image of the Israel-Lebanon crisis, Reuters has now withdrawn all 920 of Adnan Hajj’s photographs from its database after a review of his photos showed he had altered at least one other. The image below of an Israeli F-16 fighter jet over southern Lebanon was doctored to increase the number of flares dropped by the plane from one to three.
Reuters continues to deny that Hajj staged his photos of the Qana tragedy, though many bloggers remain unconvinced.
The first Reuters forgery was exposed by blogger Charles Johnson, who ironically received a death threat from another Reuters employee in May 2006. The employee, who Reuters later suspended, wrote: "I look forward to the day when you pigs get your throats cut."
Johnson’s Web site Little Green Footballs was one of four blogs to expose an apparently fake memo used by CBS News’s 60 Minutes II in a 2004 report on President Bush’s National Guard service. Anchorman Dan Rather‘s CBS career came to an early conclusion as a result of that scandal.
See a CNN report on the Reuters scandal here.
