About That Quietly Fired Reuters Editor
Charles Johnson
Mon Feb 5, 2007 at 1:41 pm PST • Views: 258
Last month we noted a report that during the Adnan Hajj photo faking scandal, news agency Reuters had not only fired Hajj, but quietly fired a top photo editor as well.
On Friday at the Lightstalkers pro photographers’ forum, John Bap had an interesting post on this subject, providing a glimpse behind the scenes at Reuters’ Middle East department: Spare a thought for the senior Middle East photographer fired by Reuters. (Hat tip: Snapped Shot.)
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? And if he didn’t give the right answer at first when the questions began, was he protecting himself or someone else in the bureau?
Frank says: