Reuters

Contrary to what these so-called news reporters lead their readers to believe, ex-Soviet dictator Mikhail Gorbechev did NOT help us "end the cold war" in any other way but to LOSE it! He was not on the same level with Ronald Reagan who is really the one responsible for ending the Cold War.

I have seen this many, many times, but it is always a good idea to continue pointing out this bias to keep people aware of just what Gorbachev's role was in the Cold War. "News" services like Reuters continue to uplift Gorby to the level of benevolent leader and kindly grandfather for helping us "end the cold war". But it just isn't true at all. Should Gorby have had his way, Russia would STILL be under the crushing thumb of the U.S.S.R. and its oppressive system.

You have to hand it to the liberal media. The American government is prosecuting its first treason case in 50 years, but the press has managed to maintain its focus on more important issues. You know, like the Mark Foley email scandal. Such dedication in the face of silly distractions is truly admirable.

Reuters reporter James Vicini took a stand for truth in his article about the Adam Gadahn:

Justice Department officials denied the case was timed to deflect attention from the fallout over lewd computer messages sent by a former Republican congressman to young male aides, a scandal that may help Democrats seize control of Congress in the November 7 elections.

Hat tip to James Taranto who adds: "To our knowledge, Reuters has not denied that this is intended to deflect attention from the fallout over Reuters' Ann Coulter scandal."

Last time I checked, DOJ officials haven't commented on whether they've stopped beating their spouses. I'll be waiting for Vicini's followup on this.

No, this isn't a joke. Of all the possible photos available of Joe Negron, the Florida state representative who has replaced Mark Foley as the GOP congressional candidate in the 16th CD, the top one here is the one the Associated Press chose to accompany its article: FL GOP picks Foley replacement.

Congressmen come and congressmen go. But the Associated Press's liberal bias goes on forever.

UPDATE: Reuters has pulled a similar stunt. Here's the photo it chose to accompany its article on Negron's nomination.

Hat tips to Free Republic members Behind Liberal Lines re AP and bitt re Reuters.

Note: The AP can of course always change the photo accompanying an online article. It's always possible that by the time an NB reader clicks on the link provided above to the AP article, a responsible editor will have done so, perhaps even embarrassed by this NB item exposing AP's bias. But the photo displayed here was the one accompanying the AP article as originally posted. I saved it to our NB server.

First from Reuters, which has not always been very even-handed in reporting economic news, a pretty decent report:

Consumers bright, Midwest business strong in Sept

By Ros Krasny

CHICAGO (Reuters) - U.S. consumer spending slipped in August but falling gasoline prices elevated shoppers' moods by September and Midwest factory activity picked up as well, according to reports on Friday that suggested the economy was still motoring along.

Meanwhile, consumer prices outside food and energy edged up just 0.2 percent in August, although year-on-year price gains hit an 11-year high, offering a mixed reading on inflation.

Poor Martin Crutsinger of the Associated Press, on the other hand, must have had a lot of pent-up negativity to get out before the weekend commences, as he took the same data and turned it into what Jim Taranto at Best of the Web described thusly: "If we didn't know better, we'd think we were heading for another Great Depression."

Remember the Reuters news vehicle that was fired upon, but not directly hit by an Israeli helicopter gunship while acting suspiciously near Israeli positions in Gaza?

The Israeli Government Press Office is now stating that they believe armored vehicles licensed to news agencies, such as the Reuters vehicle attacked, might be being used by terrorist groups to launch attacks against Israel:

Armored vehicles that were given to foreign news agencies operating in the country with the authorization of the State of Israel, may be used by hostile groups to carry out terror attacks against Israel, Director of the Government Press Office Danny Seaman warned in a letter addressed to Shin Bet Head Yuval Diskin.

On August 27 an Israel Defense Forces helicopter hit an armored vehicle that belonged to the Reuters news agency in Gaza. According to
Seaman, the incident illustrated the failures in overseeing the use of armored vehicles granted to the foreign media agencies with the permission of the State.

The vehicle's presence in Gaza in itself constituted a violation of its license terms, and moreover, the jeep was carrying only Palestinians – one with links to Hamas who was not a Reuters employee.

This story about a Vietnamese man who was a spy for the communists during the war as well as a reporter for Reuters and Time magazine is nothing short of an outrage. It also makes you wonder how many agents for totalitarianism are working in the press today. An's assertions of impartiality are all too familar as well. (An old MRC MediaWatch item on him is here.)

HANOI, Vietnam - Pham Xuan An, who led a remarkable and perilous double life as a communist spy and a respected reporter for Western news organizations during the Vietnam War, died Wednesday at age 79. [...]

In the history of wartime espionage, few were as successful as An. He straddled two worlds for most of the 15-year war in Indochina as an undercover communist agent while also working as a journalist, first for Reuters news service and later for 10 years as Time magazine's chief Vietnamese reporter — a role that gave him access to military bases and background briefings.

He was so well-known for his sources and insight that many Americans who knew him suspected he worked for the CIA.

Before Saigon fell to the communists, An worked to help friends escape, including South Vietnam's former security chief who feared death if he was found by northern forces. An later revealed his true identity as a Viet Cong commander, but said he never reported any false information or communist propaganda while in his role as a journalist.

I was thrilled to find this article featuring Bilal Hussein, the AP stringer who is currently under arrest by the U.S. military for colluding with terrorists.

AP Photographer Flees Fallujah
Witnesses US Helicopter Kill Fleeing Family of 5

by Katarina Kratovac

BAGHDAD, Iraq - In the weeks before the crushing military assault on his hometown, Bilal Hussein sent his parents and brother away from Fallujah to stay with relatives.

The 33-year-old Associated Press photographer stayed behind to capture insider images during the siege of the former insurgent stronghold.

Thrilled, because along with several mil blogs, I followed the Fallujah battle intensely, including with maps. See here and over a dozen links at bottom. But to the point. Here's Bilal's dramatic account of his escape from Fallujah. Jolan, his neighborhood was a hotbed of terrorists, they were being killed there in large groups the very day he fled.

Via LGF comes this report from the paragons of neutrality at Reuters:

LONDON (Reuters) - British Prime Minister Tony Blair launched a withering attack on Thursday on what he called “mad anti-Americanism” among European politicians.

Blair, U.S. President George W. Bush’s closest ally in the so-called war on terror, said the world urgently needs the United States to help tackle the globe’s most pressing problems. [...]

Blair, accused by critics of being Bush’s poodle who slavishly follows Washington’s line, sought to stifle a revolt in his ruling Labour Party last week by promising to quit within a year after almost 10 years in office.

Another classic from Reuters:

Four gunmen shouting religious slogans attacked the U.S. embassy in Damascus on Tuesday, but failed to harm any American diplomats before all four were killed, a Syrian official said.

Of course, the news service would provide similar cover if these gunmen were Christian... (h/t Small Dead Animals)

The Israeli military was busy Tuesday evening in the Rafha refugee camp in Gaza, striking two separate vehicles driven by Hamas activists, according to the Beeb:

Three Hamas militants have been killed in two Israeli air strikes on cars in Rafah, southern Gaza, Palestinian officials said.

The first attack killed an activist from Hamas' military wing and hurt his companion. Dozens of bystanders were also hurt, Palestinian doctors said.

Two Hamas militants were killed in a second strike on a car in Rafah.

Israeli forces have been carrying out raids and air strikes on Gaza after the capture of an Israeli soldier in June.

Hundreds of Palestinians have since been killed by Israeli action.

There has been quite a bit of debate in the blogosphere surrounding this story (note: link has been deactivated) of several days ago:

An Israeli air strike hit a Reuters vehicle in Gaza City on Saturday, wounding two journalists as they covered a military incursion, doctors and residents said.

One of the Palestinian journalists, who worked for a local media organization, was seriously wounded. A cameraman working for Reuters was knocked unconscious in the air strike, one of several in the area.

Reuters claims this armored car was hit by two missiles from an Israeli helicopter.

As you can see, Isreal's new missiles are quite different than the standard Hellfire and TOW ATGMs of the past, both of which, designed for tanks, would have minced an armored car such as this one. Ths armored car is said to have been hit not once, but twice by missiles, and the only apparent damage is a hole that seems to be surrounded by rust. Corrosion, or explosion?

I think it is fairly obvious that if the Israelis did fire two missiles at this armor car, that the car did not take a direct hit. Tanks can't survive the ATGMs Israel uses on their helicopters, and armored cars have much thinner armor than tanks. It would have cut through one side, detonated, and left a shattered, burning hulk. There was no explosion, and even a dud would have completely punched through the vehicle, exiting the other side with a noticable hole. The photo below shows no such penetration on the opposite side.

You would think that Reuters learned its lesson about publishing to the world photos doctored to create a false image. After all, they were caught with multiple false photos from Lebanon, and had to take down more than 900 images from one stringer. Reuters promised it would have "experienced editors" look at all such photos in the future.

Has Reuters kept that promise? Apparently not.

Today, 26 August 2006, Reuters ran a photo captioned: "A French United Nations vehicle drives past a photo of Hizbollah leader .... Nasrallah, in Tyre...." The power of the photo is that the poster-sized image of a smiling Nasrallah is looking right at, and smiling at, an apparently white flag flying on the French vehicle.

When Harvey Weinstein's company decides to fund a conservative documentary about illegal immigration, the media is eerily silent.

But let Harvey Weinstein's company decide to fund a documentary about the Dixie Chicks and you'll see headlines like, "Dixie Chicks documentary could be election issue".

I'd love to see the statistics on how many Americans have replaced illegal immigration with the Dixie Chicks failed tour on their list of important election issues...

The pot is calling the kettle black again. Syndicated news agency Reuters, the eponym behind the "Reutergate" (or "Reutersgate" if you follow the Drudge model) photo scandal, now says scandals "rock" the post-war Israeli government.

The president is locked in a sex scandal, the justice minister is quitting over a purported stolen kiss, the prime minister is haunted by a property deal and the country's top general is under fire for stock trading.

Welcome to Israel, after the war.

With a ceasefire in Israel's bitter battles with Lebanese Hizbollah guerrillas in effect for nearly a week, Israeli media have turned the spotlight on a series of scandals.

I first raised the question of a possible relationship between the two journalists who corroborated each others accounts of an Israeli drone attack on a civilian convoy fleeing Marjayoun in south Lebanon here. In separate stories for their respective new organizations the brothers, Lotfallah (AP) and Karamallah Daher (Reuters), corroborated each others' accounts of the attack, but neither Reuters nor AP mentioned that they are related, much less twin brothers.

This morning's Washington Post features a Reuters wire service story by one Parisa Hafezi about the Iranian Holocaust Cartoon exhibition that just opened in Teheran ("Iranian Exhibit Takes On the Holocaust").  The reporter gives the idea that the competition and exhibit are all about challenging the Holocaust and testing free speech. 

"This is a test of the boundaries of free speech espoused by Western countries," Masoud Shojai, head of the Cartoon House, which helped organize the exhibition, said as he stood next to the Statue of Liberty drawing.

In fact. almost all the cartoons equate Israel or the US with the Nazis, as part of Teheran's ongoing propaganda war against the Jews.  The point isn't to question the Holocaust - the point is to deligitimize Israel.  In fact, most of the cartoon implicitly accept the Holocaust as true, otherwise the comparisons of Sharon to Hitler wouldn't make any sense.

First Reuters had a photo scandal to face. Now Go Pundit Go has discovered that Reuters is currently employing a former writer for the People’s Daily World, a Communist Party USA publication. And it turns out his propagandistic tendencies haven't left him, as he recently wrote a glowing review in the Financial Times on how Cubans are dealing with their leader's poor health:

"Cuba remained calm on Sunday as people engaged in voluntary work, cleaned neighbourhoods and donated blood in Mr Castro’s honour."

You can see Marc Frank's latest Reuters work here.

According to Reuters photographer Zohra Bensemra, an elderly injured woman lies injured in the ruins of her house, awaiting rescue as Bensemra snaps these pictures.

Let's for a moment try to look past the staging elements that we've become accustomed to searching for over the past weeks.

Ignore for a moment the fact that a wounded elderly woman in a bombed out building is unlikely to be in the kind of physical condition needed to drag several pristine sofa pillows through the rubble and make a bed out of them. Look past the fact that she, in her weakened condition, has found a nearly spotless black blanket in the fine gray dust of a bombed out building to cover her legs against the 80 degree cold. Ignore the conveniently-placed bottled water she somehow found intact and had for the middle photo only.

It is hard to overstate the importance of what Little Green Footballs' site operator Charles Johnson learned from a clearly knowledgeable person in the news business, and revealed in a post yesterday morning. Anyone who attempts to understand events in the Middle East but is unaware of what Johnson has exposed is being shortchanged, and very likely misled.

It was only a week ago that Johnson originally caught the photoshopped "Beirut Burning" picture that sparked a blogswarm of investigations into additional photo doctoring, event staging, and other photojournalistic abuses, all of which added a new word, fauxtography, to the vocabularies of those who follow the news.

Now Johnson has expanded what began as a "narrow" photojournalism controversy into an expose of how, for decades, the news we receive from the most volatile region in the world has, in exchange for what looks an awful lot like bribery, been twisted and controlled to meet a pro-Arab, pro-terorist, anti-Israel agenda.

The fauxtography scandal is blowing out of control as proof after proof rolls in how much of the self-described photojournalism coming out of Lebanon is illegitimate. If you're a blogger (or are reading some) covering the story, drop me an email at msheffield@gmail.com and I'll include a link in this roundup. And of course, you can link in the comments as well. Comments are now open to unregistered users.

To get up to speed, check out Riehl World View, Hot Air, the Jawa Report, and Zombie. Little Green Footballs is also very much up on the story. To see previous NewsBusters coverage of phony photos, click the relevant categories below this posting.

See below for updates...

UPDATE 6:25. After an overnight hardware failure, NB is back up and running. The links will begin momentarily.

UPDATE 6:38. Snapped Shot is another blog worth checking out. Keep those links coming, folks!

UPDATE 7:05. Via NB reader Geepers comes this link to a German TV news show proving that the infamous Salam Daher, aka "green helmet guy," is a stage manager for Hezbollah. The video shows him rehearsing the removal of a body from an ambulance and giving directions to the camera operator.

That truth is the first casualty of war has been borne home by the proliferating 'fauxtography' scandal of photographs of the current Middle East crisis doctored or staged so as to portray Israel in the worst possible light. At this point, can we look at any image from the area without a good dose of doubt?

Take this morning's report on the Today show. NBC's Richard Engel, in Tyre, Lebanon, reported that:

"The fighting has made humanitarian relief efforts almost impossible. Israel has cut roads and attacked vehicles, isolating Hezbollah and everyone else."

This was followed by a clip of the unidentified individual pictured here. Judging by his words and accent, he might have been a Red Cross official. He asserted:

"Lots of people have died because they just couldn't make it to a hospital in time. Ambulances clearly marked with the Red Cross were hit right in the middle of the roof of the car. The Red Cross stands for protection and neutrality. This should not have happened."

Bloggers—and to a much lesser extent some media outlets—have paid considerable attention to specific examples of media manipulation in the war being fought between Hezbollah and the IDF in Lebanon and Israel, but we seem be under-covering the overall framing of the media's coverage, particularly when it comes to the subject matter chosen for coverage.

This comes into sharp relief when contrasted against the coverage we've become used to from the war in Iraq, particularly as it relates to the media coverage allowed and provided by two different insurgencies in Lebanon's Hezbollah and Iraq's predominately Sunni insurgency.

In Iraq, we’ve become somewhat used to embedded reporters reporting from both sides of the conflict with a fairly wide latitude to operate. Stringers, both print media and photographers, have occasionally embedded within the insurgency, providing coverage from ambushes and sniper's nests alike. The insurgents themselves often seem to be media hungry, filming operations themselves and often releasing the tapes to the media or producing them on DVDs for public consumption in Iraq and throughout the Middle East.

By and large, the vast majority of video reporting allowed and encouraged by the Iraqi insurgency is combat-related. IED ambushes are particularly popular, often released as montages set to Islamist music as propaganda videos. The Iraqi insurgents have often seemed intent on portraying themselves as rebel forces actively waging a war for the people, whether or not the people would always agree.

Hezbollah, however, seems to be fighting a different kind of media war.

For those that are interested, Charles Johnson, the proprietor of Little Green Footballs, was interviewed on CNN earlier today. He discussed at length the issue of Adnan Hajj, the Lebanese photographer at the center of Reutersgate.

Hot Air has the video.

It’s not just the doctored photos. Apart from the most recent travesty of journalistic ethics, it's worth recalling how Reuters has also tilted its words in favor of those who promote terror and misery around the world.

For example, Iraqis compelled to vote for Saddam Hussein back in 2002 were “defiant” and in a “festive mood,” while Saddam’s capture by U.S. forces a year later was marked by “resentment...of life under U.S. occupation.”

For Reuters’ editors, the first anniversary of 9/11 was a reminder that “human rights around the world” have been a “casualty” of the war on terror, while the second anniversary was a time to point out how “sympathy [for America] soured” as the U.S. actually fought back against the forces of darkness.

In the ongoing investigation of a Lebanese photographer that has been caught with his hand in the Photoshop jar as reported by NewsBusters here and here, Reuters has made the following announcement:

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.

Apparently, Reuters is taking this very seriously:

This one is pretty amazing (hat tip to Drudge). At 8:29AM ET Monday, Reuters reported that 40 people were killed in a Lebanese village by Israeli air strikes. Less than three hours later, the Associated Press reported that the number of casualties had been dropped to one. Here’s the first report:

"An hour ago, a horrific massacre took place in Houla village as a result of the intentional Israeli bombardment that resulted in more than 40 martyrs," Prime Minister Fouad Siniora told an emergency Arab foreign ministers meeting in Beirut.

Residents of Houla said they feared up to 60 people, including many children, had been killed. They said most of the people were shepherds who had refused to flee the fighting.

Here’s the second:

It’s one thing when an obviously deluded shill suggests that Americans are stupid because they disagree with him as reported by NewsBusters Saturday. However, it is quite another thing when the largest wire service in the country does it.

Yet, that’s exactly what transpired when the Associated Press published a report Sunday evening entitled “Half of U.S. Still Believes Iraq Had WMD”: “Half of America apparently still thinks so, a new poll finds, and experts see a raft of reasons why: a drumbeat of voices from talk radio to die-hard bloggers to the Oval Office, a surprise headline here or there, a rallying around a partisan flag, and a growing need for people, in their own minds, to justify the war in Iraq.”

Much like CNN’s Jack Cafferty the day before, AP didn’t offer the possibility that many of these believers feel Saddam moved his weapons to Syria or elsewhere before the invasion began. Such was certainly not on the mind of AP writer Charles J. Hanley, who, instead, wanted to make the case that Americans are just deluding themselves:

UPDATE: Go to Matt Sheffield's open thread for current developments.

__________________________________

Last night's report by Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs that a "Beirut burning" photo that was clearly and clumsily doctored with Photoshop editing tools had made it way onto the wires from Reuters has morphed into what must be considered a full-blown scandal that should, by rights, shake the news service and other "Mainstream" Media outlets to their very foundations, and force them to reexamine how they conduct and control their photojournalistic efforts around the world.

Consider just some of what has happened in the 24 hours or so since my NewsBusters post very early Sunday morning:

• Reuters has "dropped" the freelance Lebanese journalist after the image in question was shown to be doctored:

• The wire service offered perhaps the lamest excuse ever offered in the history of photojournalism for Adnan Hajj, the photographer involved --