the day before yesterday i had read about the story on littlegreenfootballs.com and figured that it was just propaganda against the media, but yesterday reuters actually pulled the picture in question, fired the photographer and apologized. they also “killed” another picture from the photographer, and removed all of his work from their database. here are the pics:

here’s the picture that adnan hajj submitted and reuters released:

you can see some pretty obvious photoshop cloning in the smoke and supposedly even some of the buildings are repeated. reuters re-released the picture as:

obiviously much less dramatic.

the same photographer submitted and reuters published this picture:

this was captioned with:

Israeli F-16 fighter jet over the skies of Lebanon, seen in the image firing off “missiles during an air strike on Nabatiyeh

the article points out, and it’s pretty obvious even to me that those are flares or chaff, and not missles, and someone else proves that that’s actually only 1 flare copied to look like 3. apparently the bombs that are being dropped are also copied.

anyway it just blows my mind that people would completely fake pictures like these, and even more crazy that it gets through the editors of what most people consider to be reputable sources.