Last week's post was the mere tip of the iceberg, folks.

07/31/06 Questions arise about photos being staged.

But staging is for amateurs. Why force real life onto film, when you can digitally manipulate it?

08/05/06 Reuters Doctoring Photos from Beirut?

More here, and an animated explanation here.

Then another photo-fraud (LGF came up with the term "fauxtography" - I like it!):

08/06/06 Another Fake Reuters Photo from Lebanon


After recalling these two pictures, Reuters decided to kill all photos posted by Adnan Hajj. Who is Adnan Hajj? Why does that name sound familiar? Probably because he showed up in last week's post!

08/06/06 And another set of staged photos featuring the same actress. Obviously the Lebanon acting agency talent pool is a little shallow, they need more depth to fill the roles without becoming repetitious.

08/06/06 Forget about repeating actors, how about repeating buildings? Powerline finds the same buildings being used in multiple stories, weeks apart.

08/08/06 Followed by more obviously-staged photos.


08/08/06 The Passion of the Toys!


08/08/06 And more staging / creative captioning fraud:


08/08/06 Mypetjawa finds some extremely similar photos, and wonders if Adnan Hajj is working under a pseudonym.

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Sorry to overwhelm with information here, but there's a lot of it, attributable to two causes: 1) An overwhelming amount of fauxtography coming out of Lebanon (and the middle east in general) and 2) the conservative blogosphere's desire to bring the MSM to account for its bias.

A lot of evidence has been presented here, with no doubt that more fraudulent photos exist. But as we have seen with these examples, these fauxtos are not subtle, they are not difficult to spot, they are not dead-ringers for reality. They are blatant examples of photo fraud. It is only with the MSM's complicity that they are published, whether it be by their incompetence or their outright cooperation.

ZombieTime has a great summary:

It's important to understand that there is not just a single fraudulent Reuters photograph, nor even only one kind of fraudulent photograph. There are in fact dozens of photographs whose authenticity has been questioned, and they fall into four distinct categories.

The four types of photographic fraud perpetrated by Reuters photographers and editors are:

1. Digitally manipulating images after the photographs have been taken.
2. Photographing scenes staged by Hezbollah and presenting the images as if they were of authentic spontaneous news events.
3. Photographers themselves staging scenes or moving objects, and presenting photos of the set-ups as if they were naturally occurring.
4. Giving false or misleading captions to otherwise real photos that were taken at a different time or place.

Read the rest, it's the most comprehensive summary of the situation available.