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At first everyone thought they were just blowing smoke, but the debunking of a Reuters photograph by a group of Web sites has launched a fiery online war in which bloggers have taken on the mainstream media. Bloggers, or writers on web logs, were the first to reveal that a Reuters photograph depicting plumes of black smoke rising over Beirut was doctored to enhance smoke above the city. The Web site www.LittleGreenFootballs.com is credited with first revealing the scandal, which has been dubbed Reutersgate, but the affair has spread far wider than the Reuters News Agency and into several of...

ATTENTION EDITORS - CAPTION CORRECTION FOR SJS01 - 05 WHICH WERE TRANSMITTED AT APPROXIMATELY 1725 GMT ON AUGUST 9, 2006. THE CAPTION INCORRECTLY STATES THE CAUSE OF DEATH. CORRECTED VERSIONS IMMEDIATELY FOLLOW THIS ADVISORY. WE ARE SORRY FOR ANY INCONVENIENCE CAUSED. REUTERS. A Palestinian man carries the body of three year-old Raja Abu Shaban, in Gaza August 9, 2006. The three-year-old girl who had been reported killed by an Israeli air strike in Gaza on Wednesday actually died of an accident, Palestinian medical workers said on Thursday. Workers at Gaza's Shifa hospital said on August 10, 2006 that the...

Is this wailing woman from Hezbollah central casting? These pictures - taken nearly two weeks apart and which some observers say seem staged - show an unidentified woman wearing all black, raising her hands to the sky as she stands in front of different scenes of devastation, apparently in the same neighborhood. The first image, by Reuters photographer Issam Kobeisi, is dated July 22, and the caption reads, "A Lebanese woman wails after looking at the wreckage of her apartment in a building, that was demolished by the Israeli attacks in southern Beirut." The second picture, by Associated Press lensman...

-Snip- As we said about the Reuters incident, media bias is a consensus, not a conspiracy. Consensus is what this apparent rash of unprofessional photography appears to be, which should remind U.S. policy-makers that active public diplomacy is indispensable as long as there are journalists who find war stories too good to check. -Snip-These new instances appear to be shoddy journalism, not propagandizing, and so their bias is inadvertent but nevertheless revealing. -Snip- Once the facts emerge in such cases, the full weight of the government's communications efforts should be made to ensure that the correct information is distributed broadly...

Warning Graphic Content Germany`s NDR presents unpublished video footage from the qana events, demasking "Green Helmet" as a cynical movie director, staging photographs with a liitle boys body. ... (more) Watch the video here Warning: It's graphic.

LGF: “Fauxtography” is born Slublog: Toys in all the right places Extreme Makeover Beirut Edition Allah Pundit * Lebanese pieta * Gway Pundit Ynetnews on AP photos Watch the Video

Reuters, you are not alone. The news agency fired a photographer this weekend after it became clear that he had doctored war photos from Lebanon, but it would seem that Reuters isn't the only respectable news organization with this problem. While not quite so stupid as to get sloppy with Photoshop, Tyler Hicks of the venerable New York Times has some questionable work of his own. In this photo, a man appears to be pulling a remarkably un-dusty, possibly dead man from wreckage in Tyre -- note the victim's shorts and his hat, which is conveniently tucked to his side....

Media Bias: Need a little anti-war, anti-Semitic buck-up? Try some Reuters coverage. The British news outlet will be only too happy to oblige. Over the weekend, a Reuters photographer was caught trying to make one of Israel's defensive attacks against Hezbollah in Lebanon look much more devastating than it was. The photo was eventually withdrawn and the photographer ostensibly fired. The photo, an image of the aftermath of an Israeli airstrike in Beirut, had apparently been altered to give the effect that the smoke was thicker and the damage worse than it was. The doctored version, credited to Adnan Hajj,...

The Passion of the Toys In Platoon, Oliver Stone said the first casualty of war is innocence. He was wrong. As the photos here show, the first casualties of war are...the symbols of innocence. And photographers from Reuters and the AP just happened upon many of these perfectly placed symbols of war's horrors. Ben Curtis, AP Sharif Karim, Reuters Sharif Karim, Reuters Sharif Karim, Reuters Issam Kobeisi, Reuters Mohamed Azakir, Reuters This last one is the only one that seems...untouched. Feel the pathos. Mourn for these oh-so-photogenic and suspiciously dust-free trinkets of childhood. Just don't ask any questions about their...

Jihadist ExterminatorYou are the Gunsmith, defender of Liberty. The jihadists have run out of children to hide behind, but they're building a secret weapons factory. Your mission: Use your rifle, dynamite, and combat knife to exterminate the jihadists and destroy the weapons factory. Note that some of the jihadists are pretty stupid and just stand around picking their noses; others are more aggressive and will attack with knives, guns, grenades, etc. Oh, and try not to step in the piles of poop! Jihadist Exterminator

Reuters reported that 40 people were killed in a Lebanese village by Israeli air strikes. Less than three hours later, the Associated Press reported that the number of casualties had been dropped to one.

Michelle recaps the Hajj/Reuters affair along with great examples of the doctored and staged photos. A must see. Click here to watch the videoA must watch

For all those having trouble logging onto Little Green Footballs to read about the latest photo fudge and double-fudges by Reuters photographers, Mark Levin led off his show last night by discussing with Charles Johnson how the original story broke.In addition, they spoke about the Reuters photos of the lady in Lebanon whose house was totally destroyed twice in 15 days by Israeli air strikes and another Lebanese lady who Reuters photographed and reported as having lost two husbands in 17 days. Mark also asked him about the recent threats Johnson received from a Reuters employee.

Order of the day: Amos, chapter 9 08 August 2006 By PAT BOOTH Suburban Newspapers consulting editor Pat Booth writes about Israeli army attacks. It was the shortest editorial I have ever written: "For God's sake stop it". Below these words was a single graphic picture of a young girl roped to a post, her hair shaved. She had been tarred and feathered by the IRA because of her love for a British soldier. That was Ireland, 1970. The heading cried out to be re-said as we watched on television the agony of Lebanon in this battle between perhaps the...

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Democratic members of the U.S. House of Representatives on Monday called on the U.S. Congress to hold hearings into BP's operations in Alaska following a second oil pipeline rupture at its Prudhoe Bay operations over the weekend that will shut the 400,000 barrel-a-day oilfield. "It is appalling that BP let this critical pipeline deteriorate to the point that a major production shutdown was necessary," said Rep. John Dingell (news, bio, voting record), the top-ranking Democrat on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, in a statement. "The United States Congress has an obligation to hold hearings to...

CAIRO, Egypt -- Anger toward America is high, extremists are on the upswing and hopes for democracy in the Middle East lie dashed. The Lebanon war is creating dangerous ripples in the war on terror, the future of Iraq -- even the effort to keep nuclear weapons from dangerous hands. "America, we hate you more than ever," Ammar Ali Hassan wrote in the independent Egyptian daily Al-Masry Al-Youm, in the kind of visceral, slap-in-the-face rhetoric boiling across the region. So far, the violence has not led allies to take steps that directly hurt America's strategic interests, such as forcing the...

Kevin Barrett believes the U.S government might have destroyed the World Trade Center. Steven Jones is researching what he calls evidence that the twin towers were brought down by explosives detonated inside them, not by hijacked airliners. These men aren't uneducated junk scientists: Barrett will teach a class on Islam at the University of Wisconsin this fall, over the protests of more than 60 state legislators. Jones is a tenured physicist at Brigham Young University whose mainstream academic job has made him a hero to conspiracy theorists. Five years after the terrorist attacks, a community that believes widely discredited ideas...

Lebanese Cabinet agrees to send troops to southern Lebanon if Israel withdraws and if it gets help from an international force.

CNSNews.com) - A Hizballah-based mortar attack, which fell short of its target in Israel on Sunday and injured three Chinese members of the United Nations Interim Force in Lebanon (UNIFIL), has received scant media attention and no reaction from U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan. Late last month, after four U.N. peacekeepers were killed in an Israeli air strike in southern Lebanon, Annan said he was "shocked and deeply distressed" at the "apparently deliberate targeting" of the outpost. While information about Sunday's incident was not immediately available from the United Nations in New York, news accounts in China reported that "A...

AN IRAQI Army medic told a US military hearing yesterday that he was sick for weeks after finding the charred body of an Iraqi girl who was allegedly raped and murdered by five US soldiers. The medic testified on the opening day of a hearing to decide whether the five soldiers should be court martialled for the murder of Abeer al-Janabi, 14, her five-year-old sister and their parents on March 12 in the town of Mahmoudiya, south of Baghdad. The medic, whose identity is secret, told the hearing at a US army base in Baghdad that he was the first...