Adnan Hajj

The 2006 Lebanon War photographs controversies (also referred to as "Hizbollywood" or "Hezbollywood")Im Zweifel für den Zweifel
' ''Der Tagesspiegel'' 9 August 2006] refers to instances of photojournalism from the 2006 Lebanon War that misrepresented scenes of death and destruction in Lebanon caused by Israeli air attacks.

CAMERA, a media watch organization, said that the photographic manipulations were used by the mainstream media in an attempt to sway public opinion and paint Israel as an aggressor, and suggesting that Israel was guilty of targeting civilians."Updated: A Reprise: Media Photo Manipulation"
Ricki Hollander, CAMERA, 8 August 2006

Photo manipulation

The Adnan Hajj photographs controversy (also called Reutersgate) involves digitally manipulated photographs taken by Adnan Hajj, a Lebanese freelance photographer based in the Middle East, who had worked for Reuters over a period of more than ten years. He admitted to using Photoshop to add and darken smoke spirals in a photograph of Beirut, in order to make the damage appear worse.Reuters Says Freelancer Manipulated Lebanon Photos
, Photo District News Online, 18 January 2007 Hajj's photographs were presented as part of Reuters' news coverage of the 2006 Lebanon War, but Reuters has admitted that at least two were significantly altered before being published. Reuters stated that Hajj had edited a second photo, cloning a flare on a picture of an Israeli F16 and falsely claiming they were three air-to-ground missiles, and critics raised further questions about Hajj's work.

The first image was discovered on August 5, 2006 when blogger Charles Johnson of Little Green Footballs wrote that the first image "shows blatant evidence of manipulation" (Adobe Photoshop clone stamp), Reuters removed all of Hajj's photographs from their site; Hajj claimed to not have intentionally altered the photo but was trying to remove "dust marks". Reuters did not stand by the photographer and admitted that Hajj had altered it, saying "photo editing software was improperly used on this image. A corrected version will immediately follow this advisory. We are sorry for any inconvenience." Head of PR Moira Whittle said: "Reuters takes such matters extremely seriously as it is strictly against company editorial policy to alter pictures."

The second manipulated image was reported by the pseudonymous blogger " Dr. Rusty Shackleford" on his blog "The Jawa Report". Reuters captioned it as showing an Israeli F-16 fighter jet firing ground-attack missiles "during an air strike on Nabatiyeh", but the F-16 was actually deploying one defensive flare, and the original photograph showed only one flare. The photo had been doctored to increase the number of flares falling from the F-16 from one to three, and misidentified them as missiles.

On August 6, Reuters announced it would stop all cooperation with Adnan Hajj. Hajj claimed he had just been trying to remove dust marks, and that he made mistakes due to the bad lighting conditions he was working under. Critics point out that this is impossible, as Hajj's doctored image added an entire plume of smoke, duplicated several buildings, and showed a repeating pattern indicating that one plume of smoke was "cloned" several times.

On August 7, Reuters decided to withdraw all 920 photos by Hajj from sale. On January 18, 2007 Reuters reported that an internal investigation into the Adnan Hajj photomanipulation had led to a top Reuters photo editor being fired. As of May 11, 2008, Reuters had removed all of Hajj's images from its site.

Allegations of staging by press photographers

A photo of a burning Qur'an amid a pile of rubble, also taken by Hajj, seemed suspicious to ''Los Angeles Times'' media critic Tim Rutten, since the building it was in had been destroyed in an Israeli airstrike hours beforehand, and everything else in the photo was already ash."Lebanon photos: Take a closer look"
Tim Rutten, Los Angeles Times, 12 August 2006 A number of photographs were taken from Lebanon showing various children's toys in the foreground, each surrounded by a pile of rubble. Rutten also wrote about this set, saying that "Reuters might want to check its freelancers' expenses for unexplained Toys R Us purchases."

Similarly, CAMERA questioned the authenticity of seemingly pristine photographs and photo albums lying on the top of the rubble of buildings destroyed by Israeli missiles, asking "how often does one find intact photographs sitting alone and undisturbed on top of the ruins of a building levelled by a missile? But coincidentally or not, photographers from various news organizations have been finding just that in rubble all over Lebanon" ... "with the only common denominator that all purport to depict Israel's destruction of Lebanese civilian life".

Allegations of photo staging by others

Salam Daher, the head of the South Lebanon civil defense organisation, was accused by bloggers and websites of being a Hezbollah member and of using the bodies of children for propaganda purposes in photographs taken at the scene of the 2006 Qana airstrike.

On 8 August, CNN anchor Anderson Cooper reported about a Hezbollah press tour of a bombed-out area in southern Beirut on 23 July 2006, during which Hezbollah operatives asked a group of empty ambulances to switch on their sirens and flashing lights for the benefit of the waiting press photographers, to give the impression that they were responding to casualties. Senior Producer Charlie Moore described the same tour as a "dog-and-pony show".

The same day, Richard Landes and ''The Wall Street Journal'' editorial writer James Taranto

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