Take a look here, all you punk ass photoshop dweebs sending your Lebanon pictures to Reuters, and see how a professional does things!
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In her ill-judged attack on global capitalism, Naomi Klein decried the phenomenon of the corporate logo. One of the sillinesses of this is that logos and brands are essentially bound up with the reputation of a firm. A firm that has a strong brand, a strong reputation for honesty, quality and high service may have taken years, decades even, to aquire it. It can take only days to lose such a reputation through stupidity or dishonesty. That is why reputation is a protection for the consumer. Statists who imagine that we need all manner of regulations to protect consumers against shysters routinely forget this point. A firm that wants to make a whacking great profit is unlikely to deliberately harm or even kill, its customers. Self-interest dictates that a firm that wants to make money over the long term will work like hell to ensure its reputation is deserved. (It may be debateable whether limited liability either enhances or weakens this process, but I have not the time to explore that here). I got thinking along these lines following the recent mess that has unfolded at Reuters, thanks entirely to sharp-eyed bloggers spotting something funny about photographs. Reuters is one of the oldest, if not the oldest, news service in the world. It both provides information directly to clients such as traders via its screens, offering real-time news alerts, and also wholesale news, providing text and photographs to newspapers and broadcasters. The company – founded by central European aristocrat Baron Julius Reuter – has employed some of the bravest and sharpest journalists in the business, not to mention folk who went on to forge careers in television like Sandy Gall or even thriller writers like Frederick Forsyth and Ian Fleming. So what has happened over the photo scandal has the whiff of tragedy as well as farce. Its reputation has been badly damaged by the photo scandal. My sources at the firm realise that the situation cannot be shrugged off and it appears this will not happen. Good. The organisation deserves credit for immediately axing the jerk who doctored photographs to make a situation look more exciting and therefore marketable than it was. The whole back-catalogue of this person’s work has been taken down. Reuter’s head of editorial, David Schlesinger – no stranger to speaking his mind about matters – is certainly like to crack the whip, although I am not yet aware that senior managers’ heads may roll because of what has happened. (Stay tuned). It is a shame in some ways since the company has been recovering financially over the past couple of years. Reuters’ profitability was hammered after the end of the dotcom boom in 2000. Bloated and complacent after the boom years in foreign exchange and equity markets during the 80s and 90s, Reuters’ lost ground to firms like Bloomberg. Bloomberg’s snazzy news and bond-dealing boxes and add-on features enticed away thousands of clients. And yet under new CEO Tom Glocer, the company started to fight back, halting the exodus of clients, simplifying its product range. It left its old HQ in Fleet Street and moved to a gleaming new office in Canary Wharf. To fight back from this, senior management must show no mercy if there are further signs of this sort of nonsense. If they do not take a hard line, one can be sure business rivals like Bloomberg or the Wall Street Journal will be ready to pounce. August 8th, 2006 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
 Accompanying earlier posts here and here, another example of some Reuters truthmaking has been exposed by the blogosphere – and guess which side of the conflict is being targeted by Reuters’ dodgy Adobe warriors? The shot and caption in question can be found here. The caption reads
Looks plausible enough to an untrained eye such as my own, however Reuters again underestimates the superior intellectual firepower ranged against it in the Blogosphere, which has exposed the “missiles” as the guided-missile countermeasure known as chaff. The fact that two of the three rounds visible are copies of the single chaff release adds to the visual fiction. The link posted above debunking the Reuters image has a lot more detail. We are starting to see the full extent of entrenched dishonesty in the Reuters newsroom, and it is astonishing that the people working for this once-venerable institution think they can get away with such crude deception. Did they think people with far, far greater expertise than these hacks would not notice? Reuters needs to get its house in order expeditiously, otherwise its supersession is assured. (Via LGF) August 7th, 2006 | 16 comments - (Comments are closed)
Drinking from Home posts two Reuters pictures (CORRECTION: one Reuters picture and one AP) of a woman lamenting the destruction of her home by the Israelis. Different dates, different homes, same woman. August 6th, 2006 | 12 comments - (Comments are closed)
Over on Media Influencer, Adriana has an article called Wikiality, discussing both the rise and rise of Wikipedia and just how badly some commentators misunderstand what Wikipedia is and is not. The issue is not “can bogus content end up on Wikipedia?” (yes, it can) but rather “does it get discovered and corrected?” Just as bloggers can write any old cobblers they want about some subject, does that mean nothing on blogs can be trusted? No, because not only are blogs generally quite open about where they are coming from (i.e. their ‘biases’), unlike MSM with their untenable claims to be ‘unbiased’, when a blog makes some questionable assertion it is subject to an army of peer reviewers who will pull apart inconsistencies and errors. Moreover the more influential the blog, the quicker and harder errors or fanciful interpretations of events are pounced on in the comments and (more importantly) on other blogs. The rapid retraction of a photoshopped image of ‘Beirut burning’ being offered for sale by Reuters just a few hours ago indicates that the era of the deference for the purveyors of The News is well and truly over. Peer review, it is not just for blogs and wikis anymore. 
Following a precision strike by bloggers from around the world, the mainstream August 6th, 2006 | 5 comments - (Comments are closed)
A modest contribution to the debate between the media and bloggers… Thanks to Jon Stewart for pointing out yet another way in which the credibility and professionalism are the flavour of the day. Obviously. My favourite phrase: arbitrarily terrifying. via BuzzMachine August 6th, 2006 | 3 comments - (Comments are closed)
The astonishingly skewed reportage relating to the Middle East, and the reactions to it on the internet, reminds me of the reportage in the aftermath of 9/11 and how that changed the way a great many people understood how news is reported. The reaction to ideologically or commercially motivated massaging of facts in the mainstream media, which claimed to be objective reporting, is what more or less created the pundit blogosphere as we know it today. The spotlight is once again on the reporters and networks who accept staged ‘photo-opportunities’ and rebroadcast them as factual ‘news’ (suitably edited). It is on the journalists who report every single Lebanese casually as ‘civilian’ even if they are members of Hezbollah (true but completely misleading). It is on the reporters operating within Lebanon under close Hezbollah direction and yet not adding a disclaimer to their reports pointing out this. It is on major western news agencies selling obviously photoshopped images of the aftermath of Israeli bombing. Of course not every journalist allows themselves to be used in return for a ‘sexy’ story, as this July 30th article shows…
So why is that not ‘front page’ news on the BBC or the hilariously named ‘Independent’? Could it be because it suggests that what the ‘Zionist entity’ has been claiming all along might actually be true? To quote the movie Network, “We’re mad as hell and we’re not going to take it any more”. We can fact-check your ass. August 6th, 2006 | 17 comments - (Comments are closed)
For those who missed this in the Samizdata comment section a few days ago, take a look at this and make of it what you will. Horray for Update: And that applies to still images as well. Reuter’s has its ‘Dan Rather moment’ as a picture of the aftermath of an Israeli airstrike is proven to be a Photoshop ‘enhancement’ August 5th, 2006 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
In accordance with their ongoing commitment to the principles of constant development and change and to show that the organisation remains determined to accurately reflect the ever-changing social and cultural landscape, the BBC today unveiled its new corporate logo:  (Courtesy of Prodicus) August 4th, 2006 | 7 comments - (Comments are closed)
There is an article in the National Review by former Sunday Telegraph journalist Tom Gross what lifts the lid on what the British taxpayers who fund the BBC gets for their appropriated money… not that CNN et al are much better:
Without the internet to fact-check and contextualize what the media shows us, our ability to form opinions about what is happening in the world would be totally at the mercy of organisations whose reportage comes filtered through world views that are perhaps no more or less distorted than any other but which claim, without any justification, to be ‘objective’. Blogs like Samizdata do not claim to be ‘objective’ as we do not hesitate to say who we think that the ‘good guys’ and ‘bad guys’ or ‘less-worse-guys’ (we do try to be truthful however) as we take the view that as long as our biases are transparent, the reader can make his own mind up about the things we say. Bias + Transparency = Credibility. You make not agree with our conclusions but we will not intentionally lie to you. However when organisations like CNN or the BBC claim to be ‘unbiased’, they are quite simply lying. I recall that pool reporters during the last Gulf War often said words to the effect “we are reporting under the restrictions imposed on us by the US military” before delivering their reports, which is fair enough as a disclaimer. I have yet to hear anything similar said by a reporter in Beirut reporting under Hezbollah restrictions (although I did hear one in Israel mutter that he was being prevented from saying exactly where Hezbollah rockets had struck), which in effect makes them a willing participant to Hezbollah’s propaganda efforts. In short, you are being deceived. August 3rd, 2006 | 17 comments - (Comments are closed)
The Spectator is, and has been for many years, the leading conservative magazine in the United Kingdom. By ‘conservative’ I do not mean that it always supports the Conservative party (it has often had articles that have attacked the certain aspects of the Conservative party), but that the magazine opposes the socialist-social democratic forces that have dominated the United Kingdom for many decades (and it must be remembered that the basic cultural institutions of the United Kingdom remained under socialist-social democratic control even when Margaret Thatcher was Prime Minister). However, it has long been a open secret in conservative and libertarian circles that The Spectator is often somewhat half hearted in its opposition to the “left” (for want of a better word). So one has to be careful about buying it. Under a poor editor, or even on a bad week in the time of a good editor, it may be little better than the BBC. Last week I bought a copy of The Spectator. I wanted a change from the death-to-Israel, death-to-America line of all the television and radio stations and much of the print media in Britain (not that they have guts to just say ‘death-to-the-Jews’ of course – outlets like the BBC on the Daily Mail claim not to be anti Jewish in the slightest, it is just a matter of opposing the bad things that Israel does and opposing the backing of the United States gives to Israel). The editor of The Spectator (Matthew d’Acona) may be a friend of the unprincipled David Cameron (present leader of the Conservative party), but he (like, to be fair, many of the people around Mr Cameron) is known to be pro-America and pro-Israel. Also on the front cover of The Spectator it was advertised that Norman Tebbit had written an article. Tebbit was Chairman of the Conservative party when Margaret Thatcher was leader. He was always an independent man willing to argue with Mrs T. if need be, but always a loyal and honourable and was badly wounded by an IRA bomb (the same bomb left his wife paralysed and many other people dead) which led to his semi withdrawal from politics, thus leaving Margaret Thatcher exposed to the plots of her enemies. The Tebbit article was good (a polite demolition of Mr Cameron’s line of policy – too polite for my taste, but that is the way Norman Tebbit writes). And there were other good articles in the magazine, however two very bad articles were present. The first was by the ex Labour ‘minister for Europe’ (i.e. minister for the EU) Denis MacShane… → Continue reading: Two bad articles in The Spectator July 31st, 2006 | 17 comments - (Comments are closed)
Reuters journalist Paul Hughes chose to spend a holiday with his wife in Beirut. just as the violence broke out. Here’s his vivid take on what it is like in that city at the moment. When it comes to covering events in Lebanon with a salty mixture of black humour, PJ O’ Rourke, of course, remains the master. July 20th, 2006 | 26 comments - (Comments are closed)
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