Tech vs tech

Last week Adnan Hajj was the most-searched term on the Technorati website, which tracks what is being discussed in the blogosphere.

Last week Adnan Hajj was the most-searched term on the Technorati website, which tracks what is being discussed in the blogosphere. And a rendering of his work was one of the most viewed videos on YouTube. Hajj, a Lebanese photographer based in the Middle East, has been charged, tried and convicted of improperly altering photographs he took for Reuters. The pictures ran on the Reuters news service on Saturday, August 5, and were discovered almost instantly by bloggers to have been manipulated. Reuters then announced on Sunday that it had fired the freelancer.

Many bloggers see an anti-Israel bias in Hajj’s manipulations, which made the damage from Israeli strikes into Beirut appear worse than the original pictures had. One intensified and replicated plumes of smoke from smoldering debris. In another, he changed an image of an Israeli plane to make it look as if it had dropped three flares instead of one.

Hajj’s activities have heightened the anxiety photo editors are already experiencing in the age of digital photography, when pictures can be so easily manipulated by computer. These advances, made broadly available to the public and professional photographers alike through Photoshop or similar software, may have made readers more skeptical of what they see in newspapers.

Story continues below this ad

‘‘They doubt the media because they understand what digital photography is,’’ said Torry Bruno, the associate managing editor for photography at The Chicago Tribune. ‘‘Everyone who plays with that knows what can be done.’’

But even as technology makes it easier to manipulate photographs, the blogosphere is making it easier to catch the manipulators. The first inkling of a problem in this case came in the form of a tip that Saturday morning to Charles Johnson, who runs a website called Little Green Footballs. It is not clear where the tipster first saw the photos, but they were available on the Internet. Johnson, who has a background in graphic design, said that as soon as he saw the pictures, he could tell they were fake. He posted the news on his website on Saturday at 3:41 p.m. California time or early Sunday morning in Beirut.

The post was spotted by a Reuters photographer in Canada, who quickly notified the editors on duty, and they began an investigation. Paul Holmes, a senior Reuters editor who is also responsible for the agency’s standards and ethics, said the agency dealt with the matter within 18 hours. ‘‘By 10 on Sunday morning, we had killed the doctored photo and suspended the photographer,’’ he said.

Hajj told Reuters he merely tried to remove a speck of dust and fix the lighting in the photos, Holmes said.

Story continues below this ad

Other news outlets have also tightened their procedures after learning the hard way about the heightened risk of photo manipulation. Last month, The Charlotte Observer fired a photographer who enhanced the colour of the sky in a local photo to make it more dramatic. The Los Angeles Times fired a photographer in 2003 after he altered an Iraq photo that it ran on the front page. Santiago Lyon, director of photography for The Associated Press, said his agency fired a photographer ‘‘in the last year’’ for changing a picture; he gave no further details. (KATHARINE Q. SEELYE and JULIE BOSMAN)