The Jerusalem Post reports on the big story which took place over the weekend. It seems that, once again, dinosaur media has been caught fabricating news for the purpose of advancing the terrorist agenda. Photos submitted by one Adnan Hajj were discovered to have been altered in Adobe Photoshop and then put up on news sites around the net. It did not take long for bloggers to discover the poorly executed cloning that was used to make the pictures far more dramatic than they otherwise would have been. And now all 920 photos by Mr. Hajj have been pulled by Reuters as a consequence of their now obvious unreliability.
Mr. Hajj offered the pathetic excuse that he was just trying to remove dust from the images. But there are several problems with this story. The first is that Mr. Hajj is probably using a digital camera. And if that is the case then dust would not be an issue since the image can go directly from the camera to a computer and thus to the Net. And if Mr. Hajj is using an older film type camera, then the first round of prints would likely have little or no dust on them since they have not had time to accumulate any. Moreover, the images, either the negatives or positive prints, would have to be scanned before they could be uploaded. This kind of cleaning up of images is usually done by a professional scanner operator in a large media organization. The photographer would likely have nothing to do with the images once they had been scanned. That's how we do it where I work, at the top printing and graphics company in the US.
Division of labor is the norm in the printing world, and there is no reason to think that a large news organization would operate differently when it comes to handling images. The protocols for graphics in this day of digital technology are pretty much the same everywhere and thus we can conclude that Mr. Hajj is guilty of his own poorly manipulated fakery at the front end and that Reuters is guilty of allowing such a hack job to get by their editorial filters because it suits their own pre-conceived political bias.
1 comment:
Dust on the lens will affect any picture - digital or film. What's more the heart of a digital camera - the imaging chip - readily attracts dust when exposed (such as when changing lenses),causing the same sort of problems as with "dirty" negatives.
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