Reuters’ vanishing reputation

Philip Klein worked for a few years as a reporter for Reuters and offers his opinion on today's American Spectator website on the "photo-gate" scandal which is currently damaging that news agencies reputation:

Though I don't have specific knowledge of what went on at the photo desk when Reuters ran the altered images, my three plus years of experience at the wire service leads me to believe the following: there is an institutional bias against Israel at Reuters, but the photo desk did not knowingly run doctored images.

[Snip]

Whatever its editors' political inclinations are, there is also a practical reason why Reuters is biased against Israel. As a global news provider, Reuters has to operate in more places than just about any other news organization, with 189 bureaus serving 128 countries. Because Israel is a free society, Reuters is able to run articles critical of the government without endangering the lives of its journalists or losing its ability to work in the country. Were Reuters to start striking a critical tone against the likes of Hamas, Hezbollah, and Arab governments, its reporters' lives would be at risk as would its ability to operate in those parts of the world. Pretty soon, it would cease to be a "global" news provider and it would struggle for a raison d'etre.

In a visit to the New York office shortly after the Sept. 11 attacks, Linnebank used essentially the same argument to explain the Reuters policy of barring the word "terrorist" from its lexicon. He said that Reuters had a long-standing policy of not using the word and that, over the years, it had been pressured by many governments to use the word to describe their adversaries (such as Turkey with regard to the Kurds). If Reuters reversed-course just because the United States was attacked, Linnebank explained, it could imperil Reuters journalists overseas.

While Reuters' mission to be a global news provider affects how it writes and reports the news, it also affects who reports the news. Because of the agency's need to be everywhere, it often relies on local freelancers for news and pictures, especially in trouble spots. Such was the case with Adnan Hajj, the Lebanese freelance photographer who was responsible for manipulating at least two photos. One photo was altered to make it appear that more smoke was rising from an area of Lebanon that had been hit by an Israeli air strike, and another photo was altered to increase the number of flares dropped by an Israeli F-16 fighter. (Reuters has since withdrawn all 920 of his photographs.)

[Snip]

As a wire service, Reuters imposes deadlines so tight that when I worked on the New York news desk, the publication time of our stories was measured down to the second. On any given day, the agency asks its journalists to churn out such a massive amount of news, information, and images that it's as if they were working on an assembly line.

While we were always told that accuracy was paramount (I know that's hard to believe now), I can attest to witnessing many highly qualified people make some of the most bone-headed errors you could imagine. There were times when I wrote stories in which I even got the day of the week wrong. As a colleague of mine once remarked, "There's no better place than Reuters to make you feel like a knucklehead." Reuters' policy requires reporters to issue a correction whenever an error is discovered, and a Google search of the terms "Reuters corrected" delivers more than 1 million hits, most of which have nothing to do with Israel.

Perhaps I am being naive, but given my knowledge of what goes on in a Reuters' newsroom on a busy day, it is completely plausible to me that a photo editor would not have noticed that Hajj's photos were doctored.

If what Mr. Klein says is true, and I have no reason to doubt his honesty, then I have to wonder what value Reuters has as a source of news. If their bias against Israel, and the West in general, is so deeply ingrained that the editors do not even realize that it is there how can they be expected to control it, assuming that they would even want to)?

If Reuters gives effective editorial control over its content to dictators and terrorists in order to keep its reporters’ lives from being endangered and preserve its access to unfree nations then why should we trust what they say about those unfree nations or terrorist groups? During the days of the Soviet Union how many of you felt you weren't getting the strait scoop about the goings on in Russia because you didn't have a subscription to Pravda?

If Reuters' need to have "feet on the ground" forces them to hire partisan players in regional conflicts as reporters and photographers how much trust should we place in their reporting? What if The Los Angeles Times hired Tony Snow to be their White House correspondent while he was still White House Press Secretary? How much credibility would they have as objective reporters of the truth?

Finally if their deadline pressures are so great that trained photo editors will fail to notice altered photographs which are so obviously altered that within an hour of their publication blog posts are up pointing out the alterations then are we not being reasonable to wonder what else they are missing?