When love for the truth is forgotten

For months now I've been on the lookout for a copy of Shattered Glass, a movie about a newspaper reporter who had been reporting events that were eventually discovered to have never happened at all. Now I can't recall if the film is actually based on a true story involving some big, East Coast broadsheet (I think it is, but don't quote me on that). The movie starring Hayden Christensen was shown in the Philippines a few years ago; I wasn't able to catch it though.

Another reminder of how much we rely on the media for information -- and how we ought to strike a balance between taking everything we consume from the media with a grain of salt, and having faith in media practitioners -- is the recent incident involving a news photographer and a digitally manipulated photo of Beirut's destruction. Really, without a firm foundation of virtues such as honesty and integrity -- and an intensive orientation in media ethics -- to guide a person through his/her choices, the power of technology is bound to be misused and abused.

Excerpts:

A Reuters employee was suspended after using the company's internet access to issue a threat saying "I look forward to the day when you pigs get your throats cut."

The e-mail was sent to Charles Johnson, who maintains the of Little Green Footballs blog.

Relatedly, Reuters said it has retracted a photograph of Beirut, Lebanon, and credited to Adnan Hajj, after discovering that it was altered - and as reported at the Little Green Footballs blog. The photograph had shown two plumes of black smoke rising out of buildings in Beirut.

The retracted photograph was titled "Smoke billows from burning buildings destroyed during an overnight Israeli air raid on Beirut's suburbs August 5, 2006. Many buildings were flattened during the attack. REUTERS/Adnan Hajj"

The LGF blog had noted that photograph "shows blatant evidence of manipulation. Notice the repeating patterns in the smoke; this is almost certainly caused by using the Photoshop 'clone' tool to add more smoke to the image .... Smoke simply does not contain repeating symmetrical patterns like this, and you can see the repetition in both plumes of smoke. There's really no question about it."

Full story at Spero News