You’re not going to believe this one.

All our suspicions about mainstream media slanting and distorting the news from the Middle East are confirmed in a bombshell of a post by Bruno Stevens, at the Lightstalkers pro photographers’ forum: The Lebanon ‘garbage dump’ story: complete explanation. (Hat tip: Snapped Shot.)

His photograph, published by both US News and World Report and Time Magazine, had a caption describing the scene as the wreckage of an Israeli jet shot down by Hizballah. In this post, Stevens reveals that the captions he sent in with his pictures described the scene accurately—but editors at the magazines changed the captions to completely alter the story.

This caption clearly says that there is no proof that an Israeli jet had been shot down and that the objective was indeed to destroy a legitimate military target.

…A week later TIME published this image shot at the same time as the first…

They choose to caption it this way (I had NO control in this matter), they HAD my original caption: “The wreckage of a downed Israeli jet that was targeting Hizballah trucks billows smoke behind a Hizballah gunman in Kfar Chima, near Beirut. Jet fuel set the surrounding area ablaze.”

The anti-Israel bias of mainstream media has never been revealed more nakedly; the editors who selected this photograph deliberately changed the caption to convey an anti-Israel message, throwing the truth right out the window to do it.

And even more damning is the photo they chose not to publish, showing a medium range ground-to-ground missile launcher hidden in a civilian truck—on a Lebanese Army base. Stevens explains:

This is a very important piece of evidence showing probable collusion between Hezbollah and the Lebanese Army, there is little doubt that the Lebanese Army was aware of the presence of at least one missile launcher and at least one large missile on their parking lot. The size of the launcher, destroyed a couple of days later from the ground by an unknown party suggest missiles 10 to 14 meters long.

There were 6 to 8 large articulated trucks parked there, making it a very legitimate target for the Israeli Air Force, quite far away from civilian houses.

As I’ve written before, mainstream media is an absolute disgrace—and this time we can’t even blame it on local stringers doing the work of Hizballah. These distortions were perpetrated by Western editors, sitting in comfortable offices, demonizing Israel and covering up evidence of Hizballah war crimes and collusion with the Lebanese Army.

As Brian at Snapped Shot notes, we owe a debt of gratitude to Bruno Stevens for telling the truth about his photos.