Fauxtography: Reuters editor fired over Hajjgate a scapegoat?

posted at 4:53 pm on February 5, 2007 by Allahpundit
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Nice catch here by Snapped Shot, diligently monitoring the Lightstalkers photojournalist forum for new and exciting embarrassing admissions and ethical lapses. The latest: a postscript to the story that broke a few weeks ago about the unknown Reuters photo editor canned for dereliction of duty in letting Adnan Hajj’s ’shoppery reach the wires. According to one poster on the site, the blame lies not with him but with Reuters’s systemic, systematic neglect for standards in its Middle Eastern bureaus. Like many of us suspected this summer, too little money and too much reliance on stringers allegedly led to mistakes and worse.

The author’s obviously a friend of the fired editor, so add a few grains of salt to this food for thought:

When [the editor] took over in July 2005 he knew the Middle East well and knew that most Reuters photographers were poorly educated stringers with no professional training or news skills. They could use the equipment, but not in a truly professional way.

He immediately asked London to set up training for photographers. Answer: there’s no money.

He asked to bring photographers to Dubai to train them himself. Answer: no money.

That meant that on top of his regional management and photo shooting responsibilities he had the enormous burden of editing pictures from 11 countries. He asked for a photo editor to help. Answer: no money. Finally, a Gaza photographer came in January 2006, but up to July he was away four months…

But by the time he took a holiday in July 2006 he had straightened out the photo operations in Iraq, Saudi and Egypt. However, bureaus like Lebanon were still a mess.

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?

Exit question: If this is true, doesn’t it mean Reuters’s claim about Hajj having “directly filed” his photos to the newswire is shinola?

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