Charles Johnson (West Coast!), is the man of the hour, making an appearance on CNN and Drudge Radio:
"I'm one man, but there's an entire army of blogs and blog readers out there, and we can count on an enormous amout of scrutiny of the mainstream media for these types of issues."
Dang skippy (didn't Tupac say that?).
PowerLine notes that the Hajj is to be rightly slammed,not just for faking pictures, but for staging them, too:
It's important to distinguish between "faking" and "staging." Reuters terminated its relationship with Hajj because two pictures were faked, i.e., digitally altered. It may well be that those are the only faked photos that Hajj submitted to Reuters. But, in my opinion, a great many of his pictures were staged, and, in my judgment, that is the more significant offense.
It appears to me that Hajj is a member of, or sympathizer with, Hezbollah. Many of the pictures he took for Reuters appear to be staged in cooperation with Hezbollah for use as Hezbollah propaganda. Thus, for example, as we noted over the weekend, the same woman was pictured two weeks apart, on each occasion allegedly bewailing the loss of her home in an Israeli air strike. Or the same wrecked building was shown on different occasions, allegedly damaged in two different bombings.
John Hawkins comments on what this means for the rest of the news coming out of the Middle East:
We know that a lot of these news organizations have working relationships with these terrorist/militia organizations. If they didn't there's certainly no way they could get shots like this one, which was taken by New York Times photographer Joao Silva.
We also know that some of these MSM organizations, at the highest levels, agreed to cover-up what really goes on in countries like Iraq, in order to get access and insure the safety of their personnel. Do you really think that the same thing doesn't go on all the time with terrorist groups like Hamas & Hezbollah or in areas controlled by militia fighters in Iraq? Do you really think that some of these local stringers that are taking pictures of these terrorists aren't friendly to them or maybe even on the payroll?
Also, didja see this video of exactly how the Hajj did his Photoshopping job? Amazing.
