Rush Limbaugh, Reuters, Doctored Photos, Lebanon

'INVESTIGATE REUTERS'

Over Doctored Photos, Limbaugh's On The Rampage





Both angry and excited at the prospect of Reuters having been caught red- handed engaging in yellow war journalism, Rush Limbaugh was on the rampage during Monday's program.

Telling listeners that the first indication of doctored Lebanon wire photos had him up in the wee hours of the morning, Limbaugh went on the warpath, blaming the current mainstream media climate on Dan Rather, among others.

At this point, Reuters has been forced to pull 920 photos by Adnan Hajj, after a number were found to have obviously been photoshopped. All seemed designed to exaggerate civilian casualties inflicted on Lebanon by Israel.

Greatly damaging what little was left of the leftist news agency's sorry journalistic reputation, Reuters now appears to have actively taken sides in the Middle East conflict.


Not simply lambasting the national media for largely ignoring the story, Rush went further, calling for Reuters to face an investigation over the matter.

From his transcript:

RUSH: You know what struck me over the weekend, ladies and gentlemen, is how the Big Media, the Drive-By Media, never, ever get investigated. They do not investigate themselves. CBS did over Rather, but they had to on that one, but they never, ever get investigated. They can distort. They can lie. They can ruin people. They can create total false impressions of reality that has real effect on people's lives, and nobody ever demands an investigation. But you let it be Big Oil that does something or let it be Big Drug that does something or Big Retail or Big Tobacco, why, we'll stop the presses and we'll investigate. I know the media has First Amendment protections and I'm not suggesting Congress should do this.

I'm just saying, in terms of the institutions that guide our lives and shape our thinking, the one that perhaps has more importance and more power than any of these others never, ever gets called to task, never, ever is investigated, while they seek to investigate and destroy everybody else that gets in their way or of their agenda.

More here:

The opening of the program here about the media never being investigated, I'm sure many of you by now have heard of the literal fraud perpetrated by al-Reuters with all of the fake and doctored photos coming out of the action in Lebanon.

It's much too numerous to recount verbally here. We have this posted at RushLimbaugh.com. I was up 'til three in the morning on Sunday working on this when I first heard about this, and trying to organize all that's out there in the blogosphere. Little Green Footballs was the first to call attention to this. Charles Johnson, who runs that blog, has had his life threatened now by a Reuters -- we think it's a Reuters employee.

Somebody has used a Reuters e-mail address to send him a death threat essentially saying, he can't wait, the writer said he can't wait to see Charles Johnson's throat slit. It all started with a bunch of fake photos about bombing attacks in Beirut. Photoshop has a clone tool. If you use Photoshop, you're familiar with this -- and you can clone any aspect of a photo that you want.

They did it with smoke, and it was just horribly done. It was so obviously hurried, not even professional, not even a professional attempt to doctor the pictures, couldn't stand up to the light of day. Reuters took awhile before they retracted the picture, but it's already out there, it had already been on front pages of newspapers just like these phony baloney, plastic banana pictures that have come out of Qana.

We now know that much of these are staged. There are two other questionable pictures. There are actually more than that. This is tip of the iceberg, folks. Dan Rather was just the tip of the iceberg.

This stuff going on here is confirming every suspicion I've had about fake news oriented toward the action line per story that Drive-By Media types had.

Anything outside that doesn't permeate, doesn't register, and they're not interested in it. In fact, they'll even make things up and enhance things and make it look worse than it was to advance their story line. Reuters ought to be disgraced forever over this. They ought to be investigated. They ought to investigate themselves.

Haven't heard any call for this, and that's what made me realize, this outfit, this bunch, this industry, as destructive as it can be, both to individuals, to corporations, and to cultures and societies never, ever gets investigated, nor do the individuals in it ever get investigated.

Now, the second picture -- and this was a doozy -- the second picture purported to show an Israeli F-16, although the F-16 was not in the picture frame.

It was cropped out. What it showed was three or four missiles being launched, obviously on innocent civilian targets. The caption is as important as the picture. It turns out that the real picture was of an Israeli F-16 firing off one flare, as in chaff, to try to confuse surface-to-air missiles if the Hezbos have any and if they were going to launch any. You take the picture; you duplicate or clone the flare and its streak of smoke through the sky which was being emitted from behind the F-16 when you see the real picture.

The cropped version made it look like these were missiles that had been fired. There were four of them. The other thing that has just been discovered -- and countless more. There have to be countless more, not just with Reuters.

Reuters has finally said: We're not going to use this freelancer anymore, Adnan Hajj, al-Sheik, whatever his name is. I couldn't care less. They pulled his entire portfolio from their website, but there's another picture showed from about a week apart. First picture is a wide-angle view of a destroyed building somewhere in Lebanon, and I think that's on July 24th or the 28th. On August 4th, the same picture -- well, picture at the same place, close up, showing one of the same buildings with a forlorn woman walking through the rubble was sent out on the wire again as evidence of a second bombing. It was the same place, the same destruction, with different angles, different fields of view from the view finder, and it's all been portrayed as two separate attacks. In the first instance where the smoke was cloned to make it look as though the whole city was on fire, they even cloned buildings.

To see where it all started, visit the blogs behind the exposure of this journalistic atrocity: Little Green Footballs, Powerline, Michelle Malkin and others.

For talk radio as a whole, Reuters represents the gift that keeps on giving. Keep it up, guys, we love ya!

UPDATE: The American Thinker adds more to the talk radio / Reuters angle.

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Some images: RushLimbaugh.com