According to Jeff Jarvis of the Guardian,
After Reuters ran a photo last week of black smoke over Beirut, suspicious bloggers noted that smoke isn’t known to rise in incredibly symmetrical bulbous billows. That was clear evidence of Photoshopping, using a tool to “clone” one part of a picture so you can cut-and-paste it over other parts. Someone took this photo, added smoke and made it darker. You can see the before-and-after most clearly here.
The sleuth who proved the hoax was Charles Johnson, the man behind the controversial Little Green Footballs blog and the same man who uncovered the faking of the memos used in Dan Rather’s fateful – for Rather, that is – story about George Bush’s military service. In that case, too, Johnson took the original and the fake the showed how the deception was done by dissecting and overlaying the efforts at technical trickery.
Reuters, however, did not wait 11 days, as CBS did, to respond to the outing. Yesterday, it pulled the photo, apologised, and suspended the photographer, Adnan Hajj.
Now, this is obviously a classic design inference, but the main thing to see is the importance that the blogosphere has assumed in recent years. No longer can legacy media organizations palm this stuff off on a helpless public.
As a journalist friend commented recently,
Contrary to what the MSM keeps screaming, the blogosphere is by its nature self-correcting,. By means of links it provides its own electronic “paper trail”, so that a dubious source can be investigated. Print cannot match this, even with print footnotes, which are cumbersome, slow, & necessarily limited. And TV cannot dream of trying. (We can hardly thank Al Gore enough for inventing the Internet.)
Funny thing: I haven’t found where Al Gore is listed as one the prophets of the Internet, though Canadian Marshall McLuhan is. (My j friend was making a joke.)