Game Over: Reuters Lies

The game is over. There can no longer be any doubt. Only those who still believe that the “documents” Mary Mapes produced for Dan Rather were genuine will now believe the so-called reporting that’s coming from the Arab side of the Middle East.



Reuters photojournalist Adnan Hajj has been caught using faking – literally faking – photographs of bomb damage to Beirut. Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs, who was one of the leaders in proving the Rather/Mapes documents were fakes, once again shows how the pictures of bomb damage to Beirut were faked.

In The Shape of Days Jeff Harrell states the obvious:

Folks, I hate to break this to you, but it really doesn’t matter very much now what happened in Beirut. Now the story is that a photojournalist — or his editor, or whomever it turns out to be — faked a photo, and that Reuters ran it on their wire. Once you start just making stuff up, the argument is over. You’ve lost.

Very few things in this life can be reduced to objective truth. Did bombs fall on Beirut? Yes, that’s objectively true. But deciding whether it was good or bad, whether it was okay or not, that’s a value judgment. And most folks have a deep-seated resistance to being persuaded by people who lie.

Michelle Malkin chimes in:

I've written to Reuters asking them to respond. Will let you know if I hear back.

Gateway Pundit notes that Reuters has some really, really good contacts with Islamic terrorists.


UPDATE:

Via Michelle Malkin: Reuters has "pulled" the faked photo and "suspended" Hajj.

From the National Journal:

For photo editors, new pressures to get it right are coming from Internet bloggers who collect and post critical comments from ordinary citizens and also from niche experts who may have intimate knowledge of the local culture, the U.S. military, or the particular news event in question, Elbert said. "We in the mainstream media have always decided what [images] we want to push out, but now people are disagreeing and questioning accuracy," he said. "This is really confounding the mainstream media."

Dan Riehl at Riehl World Review provides details on exactly how the photograph was altered.

Reuter's Photoshop Explained
Assuming that an operation like Reuters might start talking about lighting, photo angles, negatives and such, I wanted to document the photoshopping in a point by point fashion. I hope the Images below (1, 2 and Inset) accomplish that. They are enlargements taken from images everyone now has...