The Shape of Days

On Sunday night, I talked to the friend who generously provides me with a free T-1 to host this Web site. I told him that for most of the day, the bandwidth through my server had basically been saturating his Internet connection. No big thing, since it was a Sunday, and nobody else was using it. “Don’t worry,” I said. “This story will have cooled off by tomorrow afternoon.”

Boy, was I wrong.

The Adnan Hajj story is basically over. A Reuters photographer used Photoshop or a similar tool to fake at least two photographs, and the news agency, to their credit, pulled all nine hundred and twenty of his photos from their library pending an investigation.

But the bigger story — the story of faked news coming out of Lebanon during the recent Israel-Hezbollah war — is just getting warmed up.

For example, Michelle Malkin has the story of a New York Times photographer, Tyler Hicks, apparently running a false, or at the very least intensely misleading, photograph of a “body” being pulled from the rubble of a bombed building. Except other photographs taken by Hicks the same day appear to show that “body” walking around, fit as a fiddle.

Rusty Shackleford of The Jawa Report has uncovered something very curious within the Reuters archive. While the photographs attributed to Adnan Hajj are gone, photos credited to an Issam Kobeisi (sometimes spelled “Issam Kobeisy”) are still there … and some of Kobeisi’s photos are virtually identical to pictures credited to Adnan Hajj. In fact, one of them is identical.

Rusty goes to great lengths to emphasize that none of what he’s found is conclusive. The Israel-Hezbollah war is big news, and one can only assume that hundreds of photographers are out there shooting the same scenes throughout Beirut and in other parts of Lebanon. What’s more, given Reuters admitted editorial ineptitude recently, it’s entirely believable that photos in their database were simply mis-credited, that some of Adnan Hajj’s pictures ended up credited to Issam Kobeisi.

Of course, it’s also possible that Adnan Hajj was submitting photos to the wire service under two different names.

Come on. The guy staged photos. He submitted pictures with misleading or false captions. He used photo-editing software to change not only the appearance but the content of his pictures. “Benefit of the doubt” isn’t a phrase that springs readily to mind in this case.

Finally — not that this is all the news there is to report, but I’ve gotta get off my blogging butt and head into the city for my actual, non-blogging job here in a coupla minutes — “Allah” at Hot Air calls our attention to an AP photographer, Nasser Nasser, who apparently believes the Israelis are in possession of some kind of magic air-to-ground missile that can destroy a car while leaving its windshield intact.

Now the editorializing.

There are two deeply troubling aspects of this story. First, we’re starting to see that journalistic fraud is rampant in Lebanon, both the overt kinds of lies that Adnan Hajj — or Issam Kobeisi, or whatever he calls himself — was pushing and softer, subtler lies that could be the product of either malicious intent or simple ignorance on the part of photographers or editors who write misleading captions.

Which, of course, raises the chilling question: Is this the exception, or just the tip of the iceberg?

But the other troubling aspect of this story is the cry-wolf effect. We thought one photojournalist was filing false reports from the scene of a war. Now we know that — intentionally or not — the filing of false reports from Lebanon has been widespread. Which means we now have to question everything that comes off of every news wire. Not just pictures taken by one disgraced photographer, but every report filed by every reporter.

Which makes it a hell of a lot harder for us to really understand what’s going on in the world.

There’s an implicit trust between reporters and their readers. That trust emerges from an implied promise: “What I tell you is true, to the best of my ability to tell it.” Except apparently it’s not.

I want to trust the news I read. I really do. I rarely get to witness the events that affect my life firsthand. I have to depend on others to tell me what happened, and how, and to provide me with context.

And now I find that, at least some of the time, I’ve been openly lied to. For reasons I don’t understand — maybe a political agenda, maybe race-based hatred, maybe just the simple desire for fame and attention — I’ve been openly lied to.

And I hate the way that makes me feel.

I address this now to all the photographers out there who are reading this. I know there are a lot of you; I’ve looked at the log files that tell me many of you have been coming to this site from Internet message boards and other sites frequented by professional photojournalists. I tell you this: I don’t know you. I have no grudge against you personally. I have the utmost respect for what you do, for both the art and the science of your calling.

But I do not trust you. Because of the actions of one, a few or a multitude of your colleagues — we don’t know, and may never know, how widespread this deceit has been — I do not trust you.

But I want to trust you. The public wants to trust you. Help us trust you by telling us the truth, and by being rigidly intolerant of those among you who stray from that ethic.

Please. We need you.

• Funny, we don’t have any trouble spelling ‘Poniewozik’
• That’s okay, I’m above all that silly fame and attention stuff
• Adnan Hajj suspended over doctored Beirut photo