News faked:

[robc]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/middle_east/5254838.stm

Apparently the guy had also cloned damaged buildings and it was so badly done that the picture editor should have spotted it immediately.

http://today.reuters.co.uk/news/articlenews.aspx?type=topNews&storyID=2006-08-07T144119Z_01_L06301298_RTRUKOC_0_UK-MIDEAST-REUTERS.xml

[400d]

Man tha's horrible. And he denied it even it has been verified as manipulated. Shame on him as a photographer.

[cyrus]

Eh, I'm not so shocked. News by its very nature is "faked" because it is selective - and has to be (no reporter can report everything within the full context) and each side in a war tries to play up their victim status whilst playing down the other side's complaints and the media generally goes along.

For example we've seen attempts to manipulate images regularly in the course of this "War on Terror" - remember the photos of the toppling of the statue of Saddam in Firdos Square, which was shown around the world from close-range in order to suggest that a large mass of Iraqis had pulled down the statue themselves as part of a mass uprising, but when the even was seen from farther away it became obvious that there were only a few people present (most of them agents of Chalabi) at the event and a lot more US military personnel, so the whole event wasn't a glorious spontaneous Iraqi popular uprising as depicted?

Compare the close range shots on major news outlets: http://www.cnn.com/2003/WORLD/meast/04/09/sprj.irq.statue/
and http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/in_depth/photo_gallery/2933629.stm

With the long-range shot: http://www.informationclearinghouse.info/images/SQ2.gif

and see: http://www.unknownnews.net/040707toppling.html and http://the.honoluluadvertiser.com/article/2004/Jul/05/mn/mn03a.html

Or the attempts to simply delete images of the Marine coffins, supposedly to protect their "privacy" (suddenly privacy becomes an concern!)

"Respectable" news outlets regularly manipulate images to make them "fit" with the story slant despite their protestations:

See for example the June 27, 1994, Time Magazine and Newsweek cover images of the same mugshot of O.J.Simpson - the one on Time looks darker, with OJ unshaven etc. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:OJ_Simpson_Newsweek_TIME.png

Then there was the case of Newsweek, which superimposed Martha Stewart's face on another model's body - http://www.nppa.org/news_and_events/news/2005/03/newsweek.html

National Geographic in the 1980s had a cover which showd two egyptian pyraminds closer to each other than they are.

Matthew Brady regularly "posed" his dead subjects in his photos of the civil war.

And I believe Lincoln's photo was "adjusted" to shorten his neck.

[darr]

Advertising and propaganda are the same thing; objectivity may change how it is viewed. History is written by the guy that won.

[Freelancer]

I always thought that the news was supposed to be factual and true. Not what a newsman wants it or thinks it should be.
Silly me.

[tim atherton]

I always thought that the news was supposed to be factual and true. Not what a newsman wants it or thinks it should be.
Silly me.

How quaintly naive....

[robc]

"The first casualty of war is the truth"

[Andrew O'Neill]

...and this ain't a new thing. As you know, it's been going on since the beginning of photography. It's just easier now...well, not for guy who did the pathetic cloning job on the smoke.

[Jim Ewins]

And then there is painting. Jackson P anyone?

[Christopher D. Keth]

Wow. He should know that even the legally blind are probably visually savvier than that these days. It might have snuck under rader if he photocopied it a half dozen generations...

[John Kasaian]

"Newspapers are the playthings of a few rich men"

[Hal Hardy]

There are times when modifying a hard news photo may be unavoidable. Adding to the image doesn't qualify.

I work in the prepress department of a county newspaper. Once, some X rated graffiti in a photo on A-1 wasn't noticed until after the press had started. The photo couldn't be replaced since all of the shots had the graffiti and all reproduction was optical back then so it couldn't just be cloned out. I was able to do a manual version of pattern cloning with the final negs that avoided killing the story and redoing the whole page. Nobody liked it doing it, but we had to compromise to avoid offending the readers and getting the press up and rolling again.