I am of the opinion that, practically speaking, no amount of retraction can undo the damage done by such things. It also makes me wonder how much more widespread journalistic (photo or or otherwise) fraud there is that we simply don't know about.

I hear (although I could not list any specific poll) that the general public has a low level of trust in the media in general. I guess it will continue to get lower and lower.

Geez, Reuter's didn't catch that obvious fake? You can see the blatant "copy/paste" pattern. I mean, if you're gonna fake it, at least don't do such a shoddy job.

Idiot! (the photog, not you Nephy.)

I know- I'm an Egyptian Demon Bitch;)

I saw before and after pictures of a city shot and didn't see the point of altering them. Instead of brownish smoke there was grey/blue smoke. Weird. I like Reuters zero tolerance rule about altering photos. But it does make me wonder how often this has been done...

Some of the alterations are so incredibly obvious that there is certainly at least one editor that should be fired. There is either gross negligence, gross incompetence, or complicity involved.

Totally. I have only seen one set of two photos. A bombed cityscape...

The flares one is not obvious. In addition to the smoke he also duplicated some of the buildings which makes everything look more destroyed as well.

Yes, it the smoke cloning was horribly obvious but I don't really blame the photo editor. One, he can't go about his job with the assumption that his own people are trying to fool him and who knows how many photographs he is having to deal with in how much time.

I really don't think outright photographic manipulation is common because the photographers know that getting caught will ruin their career (and zero tolerance really is the policy, photojournalists have lost their job for simple color correction). What is probably more common is actually staging the photo.

Can I ask what the job of photo editor is then? I'm not really trying to be rhetorical. Perhaps I don't understand. I would figure one of the tasks assocated with it is looking for obvious fraud such as this.