Snapped Shot

Always Watching the All-Seeing Eye

 

Behind the Scenes at REUTERS

Here's an enlightening look behind the curtain over at Reuters' Middle-East department.

When he was called from holiday to the Lebanon war he learned that several stringers on the front line in the south did not have Reuters cameras. Two office computers had viruses and were infecting others. No FTP server was available for accessing pictures for editing, so photographers were filing to the private email of the Beirut chief photographer. He didn't have the password so he couldn't access pictures directly. Add to that the fact that no one in the Beirut photo operation could write acceptable captions, and that he found someone unqualified and unauthorised in the office accessing the pictures, and the nature of the task he faced in the middle of a war begins to emerge.
...
Outgunned, beset by equipment problems and technical difficulties, swamped by the flow of pictures—many gory to the extreme—he worked all day and into the nights to select, edit, caption and file. Was it possible to have complete oversight in such conditions? Is it surprising two tampered pictures got through? He accepts responsibility for not spotting them, but could he not have expected backup from the Singapore photo desk? And if he didn't give the right answer at first when the questions began, was he protecting himself or someone else in the bureau?


Blaming the institution for the problems isn't exactly a new thing, but there's probably quite a bit of validity to what John's saying. To me, though, the issue now becomes one of identifying where the buck stops best. Are senior Reuters managers merely incompetent with financial planning? Or are they so institutionally biased against Israel that they don't recognize obvious propaganda when they see it?

Don't miss out on the comments, though. Eyal says it best: In some places people know how to manipulate the media – they know how to act and what is expected from them so that the photographer will get a good shot.

Update: Well shiver me timbers! It doesn't happen often, but I definitely celebrate when it does. Many thanks to the all-knowing AllahPundit for the generous hat tip and the kind words!
 

Trackbacks

Pajamas Media on 2007-02-06 05:14 #1300

A New Perspective on Fauxtography:

Snapped Shot offers a fascinating glimpse behind the scenes in the Reuters photography department during the Lebanon War, courtesy of a post at Lightstalkers. (h/t Hot Air)...

Comments [RSS]
Display comments as (Linear | Threaded)

Here is what a handful of random people think about this article. But first, the fine print:
The opinions expressed here, even where approved for display, do not necessarily reflect the opinions of this website, the management, or any other entity or organization, with the exception of the Vast Zionist Conspiracy. Those opinions we represent in style, yo. Please keep the language in these comments clean, as this is intended to be a family-friendly, work-friendly website. Comments not compliant with this policy will be edited for content where necessary. Abusive or otherwise illegal comments will be reported to the proper authorities, up to and including the aforementioned Vast Zionist Conspiracy. The Management cannot and will not be held responsible for commenters making a spectacle of themselves, even if The Management are the said commenters in question. In other words, don't take yourself so seriously, folks. We're all here to discuss the news, and more importantly, to have fun. Now go get yourself into some OCD treatment program—you obviously need it if you actually read all of this mess.

No comments

Add Comment

HTML-Tags will be converted to Entities.
E-Mail addresses will not be displayed and will only be used for E-Mail notifications

To prevent automated Bots from commentspamming, please enter the string you see in the image below in the appropriate input box. Your comment will only be submitted if the strings match. Please ensure that your browser supports and accepts cookies, or your comment cannot be verified correctly.
CAPTCHA

Enclosing asterisks marks text as bold (*word*), underscore are made via _word_.
Standard emoticons like :-) and ;-) are converted to images.
BBCode format allowed