Stop the Israel-Lebanon photo doctoring insanity!

From Reuters:

LONDON, Aug 7 (Reuters) - Reuters withdrew all 920 photographs by a freelance Lebanese photographer from its database on Monday after an urgent review of his work showed he had altered two images from the conflict between Israel and the armed group Hizbollah.

Global Picture Editor Tom Szlukovenyi called the measure precautionary but said the fact that two of the images by photographer Adnan Hajj had been manipulated undermined trust in his entire body of work. [More...]

Basically, Hajj (obviously) photoshopped more smoke into pictures of an Israeli air raid in Beirut. But that's just the tip of the iceberg it seems: blogs are having a feeding frenzy discovering other major news sources carrying doctored/phony/photoshopped/misleading pictures of the war in Lebanon:

• AP Beirut photo faces questions
• Down the Rabbit Hole (New York Times)

The common thread? Making Israel look worse than it is in its war on Hezbollah.

(For a humorous take on the situation, check out the "You Can Be a Reuters Stringer Too! Karnival.")

Update: Michelle Malkin has an uber post that exposes the "Fauxtography" of the New York Times' "Lebanese pieta" and the cover photo of last week's US NEWS & World Report. Really, the discoveries are almost coming in faster than bloggers can report... how sickening it is that so much photographic reporting from the Middle East is now being shown to be completely false.

As others have quoted, William Randolph Hearst told a Cuban reporter in 1897, "You provide the pictures, and I'll provide the war."

Seeing the blogged compilations of obviously staged photographs- women mourning "their" destroyed homes, childrens' toys deliberately placed in frames with rubble, etc. - it's not hard to believe that the same yellow journalism is still with us today.

I've often heard that much video and photographic material out of the Middle East is tampered with in some way, but credit the blogosphere with documenting the evidence that proves beyond a doubt that yellow photographic journalism is in fact a huge problem.

I have to wonder if it is always the defender in a war that is favored by the manipulations ... or if that is just the case this time around.