Reuters Accused of More Fauxtography

Russian, Serbian, Spanish and German web sites have published similar stories contending that Western corporate media is using psychological warfare against Russia through staged images allegedly from the Caucasian War.

Reuters photographer, David Mdzinarishvili, is accused of staging the faked scenarios. Check these examples.




Reuters captioned the above photo as Georgians standing next to the body of their son in the town of Gori. However, as indicated by the red arrows, the picture below shows that the dead son's body has apparently been moved about 10 feet and positioned the same as the previous photo.




Interestingly, the photos show the woman looking to the heavens in one image while wailing over the body in the next. It's not really clear which picture was taken first but it sure seems that the woman is more interested in the camera than her supposedly dead son's body.

According to the sources, the photo staging is an attempt by Western media, "British Reuters" is specifically blamed, to make Russia look bad in the eyes of the world. A faked photo of a Serb concentration camp by a British news team is cited as a previous example.

Frankly, the logic doesn't make much sense. First of all, Reuters doesn't have to help make Russia look bad. Although the Russians claim they were provoked to invade a democratic nation, no rational person buys it. What possible threat does tiny Georgia represent to huge Russia that requires a military invasion? I contend none.

And even though Reuters has a reputation of doctoring and staging photographic scenes, it's usually with an anti-Western tilt. Arguably, Reuters and most of the mainstream media leans to the left politically and if there was a desire to put bias into a photo, it would likely be pro-Russian, not anti-Russian.

Furthermore, the sources attempt to link the Reuters photos to a conspiracy with Secretary of State Condaleeza Rice. Now, that is ludicrous. Reuters may be creative with its photos but I'll never believe it was done at the request of the Bush administration.

To close, my assessment of the photos is that the photographer was simply lazy, needed something that would get him a paycheck, so he made stuff up.


More at these Sources:

Radio-Utopie.de
Tlaxcala.es
Byzantine Blog