There has been so much talk over the doctored photos of Lebanon posted by Reuters that it is ridiculous. Of course the typical tin-foil hat wearers over at LGF jumped right on it and has coined it as some liberal media plot.

Reuters has since posted about the pictures and what happened:

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.

“There is no graver breach of Reuters standards for our photographers than the deliberate manipulation of an image,” Szlukovenyi said in a statement.

“Reuters has zero tolerance for any doctoring of pictures and constantly reminds its photographers, both staff and freelance, of this strict and unalterable policy.”

The news and information agency announced the decision in an advisory note to its photo service subscribers. The note also said Reuters had tightened editing procedures for photographs from the conflict and apologized for the case.

This isn’t some big conspiracy. What this comes down to is some photographer who was in such a hurry to make a buck he short cut his work and got caught. This guy could have seriously spent another 10 seconds on this photo and made it look more realistic. If he did the typical clone in Photoshop, then it would have involved dropping down to the next tool in the tool box and he would have had a handy tool called the “smudge” tool, which I used to quickly do this:

If he was out to make things look worse then they are, then wouldn’t he have been a little more careful in his work? Of course he would have. This guy got in a hurry and short cut his own work. He got caught and is now gone. This wasn’t some conspiracy of the “liberal media”, rather it was the shitty workmanship of a photographer.