Lies, damned lies, and ... offshored journalism?

[unixronin]

Geoff Mendelson is an Israeli I know from the Rescue list at sunhelp.org.  He has some interesting comments about Reuters' withdrawal of photos from a freelancer in Lebanon after it was brought to their attention that some of the photos had been doctored.  Seems Reuters outsourced their editorial staff to India, and did it cheaply; the average age of their office staff is 25.  Not much of a well of journalistic experience there.

And apparently, that's how a lot of Hizb'Allah's propaganda slipped through.  Yup -- it appears this oft-used "freelancer" is actually a Hizb'Allah propagandist.  Beirut burning?  Faked.  The Qana "massacre"?  It's widely alleged that while the photos weren't doctored, the entire scene was staged.  And photos allegedly showing the results of two separate Israeli air strikes on July 24th and August 5th are two different views of the same building, one taken through a fish-eye lens to make it appear to be a different scene.

I've said it before, I'll say it again.  Hizb'Allah is not fighting this war as a military conflict.  They are fighting it on the stage of world opinion, and they're playing dirty to a credulous media that believes anything they read on the newspapers or watch on the nightly TV news.  And the worse it looks, the more likely it'll be on the news, because as we all know, the mantra of the news entertainment industry is "If it bleeds, it leads."

Kudos to Reuters for, at least, finally pulling all the photos from this source.  But they should have been checking them all along.  When you provide news to the world and assert its accuracy, you have a responsibility to exercise best efforts to make sure that what you're reporting is actually the truth.

Other coverage: Boston Herald, the New Zealand Herald, The Guardian, the Houston Chronicle, and a lengthy editorial from Yahoo! News which asserts a pattern of institutional failure.

Michelle Malkin examined Reuters' publicly-proclaimed quality assurance standards and found the following:

"Our policy is to send news to our customers only after scrutiny by a group of production editors who ensure quality standards are maintained across all our news services. When we get something wrong, our policy is to be honest about errors and to correct them promptly and clearly."

This clearly indicates a group of editors was fooled by a crude fake photograph. There can be no denying by Reuters that its organization is deeply flawed in terms of its ability to enforce elementary quality standards. And any client of Reuters which continues to accept photographic material from it is on notice that the organization is unable to stand behind the integrity of its photojournalism, and that it does not plan to do anything about the organizational failure to which it has admitted.

Apparently, these same editors are still unable to detect the obvious problems the outside analysts of the blogosphere have already uncovered. Any outside observer can justifiably conclude that a breakdown in basic quality assurance standards has occurred, and that the organization is unable to correct itself.

Yahoo! suggests that the entire body of Middle East coverage should be reviewed for accuracy.  I suggest that it would be a good start.

Comments

[fruitylips.livejournal.com]

Bah! I find it hard to believe that the age of the photo editors is the issue. heck, I would expect a pup to be able to more easily spot an obvious photoshop job (and this one was pathetically bad).

The thing that amazes me is that people outsource the thing that they sell. Reuters sells one thing: credibility. Checking and rechecking are the things that gave them this. This is as stupid as a company built on world class support outsourcing their phone support.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

I think Geoff's point wasn't primarily the age, as much as that they hired people who had little experience in journalism, didn't understand the importance of credibility, and didn't care about verifying the photos.

[unixronin.livejournal.com]

Oh, forgot to add, I'm right with you on the folly of outsourcing what you sell.