Where There's Smoke There's Fire

Reuters is a well-respected United Kingdom-based news service that provides reports from around the world to various newspapers and broadcasters. However in August 2006, Reuters was involved with an incident that greatly marred their reputation.

A photograph released by Reuters News Pictures featured smoky buildings in the Lebanese city of Beirut after an Israeli air raid. Thanks to online bloggers it was discovered that the smoke in the photo had been (quite poorly) altered using Photoshop (see below).

Reuters Original Photo

Reuters Manipulated Photo

As a result of the active bloggers in the public sphere, Reuters received over 200 emails from readers who had discovered the altered image. As a result, Reuters quickly fired Lebanese freelancer Adnan Hajj after discovering the photographer altered the image of the Israeli-Hezbollah conflict.

In an attempt to salvage any remaining reputation, Reuters Global Picture Editor Tom Szlukovenyi stated that, “there is no graver breach of Reuters standards for our photographers than the deliberate manipulation of an image.”

Upon further investigation, Reuters pulled 920 of Hajj’s images from its archive and found that two of them had been digitally altered. The fact that Hajj had manipulated two of his photographs ultimately meant that none of his images could be trusted or accepted as a truthful depiction of reality. Though Reuters worked diligently to fix the situation and the bad press surrounding the incident, the fact that the news service published that photograph in the first place had a lasting effect on the reputation of the company.

That same month, Spanish newspaper El Nuevo Herald also published an altered image that combined a freelancer photo with an Associated Press photo to suggest Cuban police officers were ignoring prostitution. However, this story received very little press and flew under the radar of the blogosphere. As a result of no active citizen engagement, none of the editors or designers of the newspaper faced suspension for the image.

The case of the manipulated Reuters photograph exemplifies how citizen engagement in mainstream media holds news producers accountable for the information that they present. Likewise, when citizen engagement does not happen, as with the case of the Spanish newspaper El Nuevo Herald, media corporations are not held responsible for the misrepresentation of reality and as a result the unsuspecting public may never learn the truth.