Bloggers correcting Reuters to backfire on ‘citizen journalists’
Conspiracy theorists of the right wing blogging variety are in full flow trying to discredit photos of the Israeli-Hezbollah conflict from the comfort of their homes. Some of the more tenuous claims are easily dismissed by the Telegraph, but the successful (and correct) discrediting of a Reuters freelance will have ramifications.
It’s good that the faked pictures of Israeli bombing have been exposed and that the photographer in question will probably never work again. He lied in the pursuit of a political goal. That’s inexcusable.
Yet that doesn’t mean that incidents like Quana or the bombings of a UN post and a clearly marked Red Cross Ambulance didn’t happen. Israel would surely deny them if that were the case.
The lying photographer’s plans have backfired badly as real incidents are sickeningly trivialised in an apparent attempt to deny that Israel has made mistakes.
Ultimately, it’s citizen journalism – the use of frontline images submitted by ordinary people – that will suffer. If Reuters can no longer trust freelances it’s used for years, it can hardly trust total strangers, especially if those strangers happen to be political bloggers.
Contact Stephen Newton
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