Reuters news agency was caught cropping photographs of the Gaza blockade-running raid by Turkish radical Islamists, removing knives from the hands of the extremists and blood from the scene. Previously, in its coverage of the Lebanon war of 2006, Reuters was forced to retract altered images by a local photographer, Adnan Hajj, who manipulated photos to exaggerate damage, turn Israeli flares into missiles, and otherwise influence the reader towards sympathy with Hezbollah.
Reuters fired Hajj and removed his work from its archive. Six months after publication of the Lebanon pictures, Reuters editor in chief for global news David Schlesinger described the incident as “the inadvertent publication of two rogue photographs. There was absolutely no intention on Reuters’ part to mislead the public,” Schlesinger declared.
