Being away from civilization for a few days and I am still catching up but I noticed something today regarding the doctored images by a Reuters freelance photographer, Adnan Hajj.
“Manipulating photographs in this way is entirely unacceptable and contrary to all the principles consistently held by Reuters throughout its long and distinguished history. It undermines not only our reputation but also the good name of all our photographers,” Szlukovenyi said.
“This doesn’t mean that every one of his 920 photographs in our database was altered. We know that not to be the case from the majority of images we have looked at so far but we need to act swiftly and in a precautionary manner.”
(emphasis mine)
Either the speaker of the above words, Global Picture Editor Tom Szlukovenyi, needs to take a few language courses, or he is trying to hide something.
Why would they need to qualify that not EVERY ONE of his 920 photographs in their database was altered?
Why would they say they know this is not the case from the MAJORITY of images looked at so far? Majority implies anything from 1 more than half all the way up to all of the images.
i.e. Tom’s words could easily imply that as many as 459 of the photos taken by Adnan Hajj may be doctored. This is obviously not the case, but why would Reuters not come out and say after a thorough analysis, they found X number of photos were doctored and print a retraction on all the doctored photos?