Read the given passage and answer the questions that follow.
Much to their annoyance, pen-pushers are routinely reminded that a picture is worth a
thousand words—except that sometimes they can be wrong ‘words’ as happened last week
when Reuters was forced to withdraw more than 900 pictures taken by a freelance
photographer after it was suspected that he had ‘doctored’ two recent photographs of the
Israeli-Lebanon conflict.
In one picture, the smoke billowing from an apartment block after an Israeli air strike was
allegedly thickened by the photographer, Adnan Hajj, to dramatise the impact of the
bombardment — and in another two flares were suspected to have been added to an image
of an Israeli jet in action over Lebanon.
The allegation of doctoring, first made by several bloggers, was confirmed by Reuters after an
inhouse investigation. Mr. Hajj, who had sold pictures to Reuters for more than 10 years,
denied manipulating the two photographs and attributed the thick smoke in the first picture to
“bad lighting” and the fact that he was “trying to remove dust marks.” As for the second, he
said, “there was no problem with it — not at all.”
But Reuters was not convinced and said it was removing all of his pictures from its database
and would not be using his services any more. “This represents a serious breach of Reuters’
standards and we shall not be accepting or using pictures taken by him,” the news agency
said.
The idea that the camera never lies is as misleading as the notion that all statistics are meant
to mislead. What the ‘eye’ sees is not always what it looks like, thanks to the many ways in
which first the camera and then the photograph can be — and is often — manipulated.
Indeed, a photograph can be manipulated in more ways — and more effectively — to convey
a false reality than it is possible to do through the written word. Ask any clever photographer
and he will tell you the tricks the camera can be made to play.
At a seminar recently, one journalist recalled how there was a time when British
photographers, covering stories about famine or floods in Third World countries, would carry
teddy bears with them in order to use them as props for pictures supposedly showing that all
that was left in the household, stricken by death and destruction, were children’s toys.
Reuters withdrew pictures of a freelance photographer because: