Malicious Gary Hershorn

My guess is the staff members at Reuters are not happy with the exposure they've received since putting the Bush bathroom break photo on their wire.

REUTERS PHOTO



REUTERS CAPTION

"U.S. President George W. Bush writes a note to Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice during a Security Council meeting at the 2005 World Summit and 60th General Assembly of the United Nations in New York September 14, 2005. World leaders are exploring ways to revitalize the United Nations at a summit on Wednesday but their blueprint falls short of Secretary-General Kofi Annan's vision of freedom from want, persecution and war."


From Photo District News:

Don't blame the photographer.

That's the message from Gary Hershorn, a picture editor for Reuters, about the photo yesterday that shows President George W. Bush writing an all-too-human note during a UN meeting.

Bush is shown writing: "I think I may need a bathroom break. Is this possible."

The photo, which quickly became fodder for blogs and e-mails among friends, was taken by Rick Wilking, a contract photographer based in Denver who recently covered the flooding in New Orleans.

Hershorn, Reuters' news editor for pictures for the Americas, says he's responsible for zooming in on the note and deciding to transmit the photo to Reuters clients. He says Wilking didn't know what the note said when he shot the picture.

"I'm so adamant that Rick has nothing to do with this. He was just the guy who pushed the button," Hershorn says.

In response to the attention the photo is getting, Reuters' spokeswoman in London released a two-sentence statement about the picture: "The photographer and editors on this story were looking for other angles in their coverage of this event, something that went beyond the stock pictures of talking heads that these kind of forums usually offer. This picture certainly does that."

So how did the picture happen?

...Wilking shot about 200 images and sent two memory cards to the press room at the U.N., where Hershorn was working. Hershorn looked at the images on a computer and initially decided not to send any of them.

But a few hours later, he started to wonder about a note that Bush was seen writing in three of the pictures. Out of curiosity, he zoomed in to see if he could read it.

Once he saw what it said, Hershorn decided the note was interesting and worth publishing. The white parts of the picture were overexposed, so a Reuters processor used Photoshop to burn down the note. This is a standard practice for news photos, Hershorn says, and the picture was not manipulated in any other way.

...It's unclear how widely the picture was published; Hershorn says The (Toronto) Globe and Mail published it but he wasn't sure of any other outlets. Hershorn says he decided to transmit the picture because it was interesting.

"There was no malicious intent," he says. "That's not what we do."

Yeah, sure. Reuters had no malicious intent.

The Reuters spokeswoman in London gave one of the lamest explanations I've ever heard. The photo covers the event from a different angle?!?

Attempts to justify the distribution of that picture fall flat.

I won't blame Rick Wilking, the photographer; but I will blame Gary Hershorn, the picture editor.

Hershorn went to the trouble of having a Reuters processor use Photoshop to find out what the overexposed note said.

At that point, Hershorn "decided the note was interesting and worth publishing."

Any way you slice it, that decision was grounded in malice. It was a juvenile thing to do.

Reuters, like CBS and AP and NBC and the New York Times and the Washington Post, is staffed with liberal partisan hacks. They perform their jobs in a fashion that one would expect from partisan hacks.

I'd like Hershorn to explain exactly what his intent was by putting that picture out on the photo wire.

"It was interesting" doesn't cut it.

Specifically, what about the note does Hershorn find interesting and newsworthy?

There is no conceivable answer to that question, other than it serves to embarrass the President of the United States.

The fact is Reuters is a propaganda outlet, lacking journalistic integrity and all credibility.

Pure trash.