Reuters is making lemonade re “Faux”togate

As I’m sure you know by now, the story about Hajj’s altered photos is hitting the MSM. The most recent story I read comes from the BBC. I found two things amusing. First, this “are they just being polite?” moment from Reuters:

Mr Hajj, a freelance photographer working for Reuters, denied altering the second photograph, an image of an Israeli F-16 fighter over Nabatiyeh in southern Lebanon.

“There’s no problem with it, not at all,” he said in a BBC interview.

Paul Holmes, editor of political and general news at Reuters, told the BBC that senior photographers at the agency “weren’t convinced” that cleaning dust off the first image would result in the manipulation the image showed. [Emphasis mine.]

Only politeness (or idiocy, I guess) could account for this mild “weren’t convinced” in the face of a claim that cleaning dust off a digital photograph could result in adding myriad smoke plumes and buildings.
The other Reuters moment is where Reuters urges us to believe that it considers this all a good thing:

Mr Holmes said Reuters welcomed the growth of weblogs, which had made the media “much more accountable and more transparent”.

I guess it’s sort of the way one welcomes a colonoscopy or something — brutal, but necessary.

I’m looking forward to the future to see whether Reuters and the other news agencies (a) check their stock for other quality inspection failures and (b) get off their high biased horses and actually start reporting carefully vetted news.

One other thing: just as NPR was silent about the role Little Green Footballs played in this, so too is the BCC. I wonder why. Too much information? Afraid it will lead traffic to the blog and that people might be exposed to information they’ve never seen in the MSM? Worried that they’ll have to revisit Rathergate? I don’t know. It will be interesting to see how the Times and WaPo handle this, since Johnson says both interviewed him.

UPDATE:  Rusty Shackleford has more on Reuters’ failure to confront the real ramifications of Hajj’s fakeries.

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