Reuters' Cheap Shots

With yet another disgraceful photo, Reuters once again shows its Lefty anti-Bush Administration bias.

Last September, Reuters went to great lengths to decipher a note that President Bush jotted down to Condoleezza Rice during a Security Council meeting at the UN.

Let's flash back to the "Leak from Reuters."

Who could forget this "historically gripping" photo, taken by Rick Wilking of Reuters?



I wrote:

Reuters really dropped a load this time. What good does dumping that photo do?

It's a transparent attempt by Reuters, the news outlet that refuses to call a terrorist a terrorist, to diminish Bush in stature.

By presenting the leader of the free world as if he were a first grader asking permission to relieve himself, Reuters hints that Bush was not properly concentrating on international issues, but instead, focusing on other more intimate matters.

I don't recall. Did Reuters ever run any private notes written by Bill Clinton on their photo wire?

My guess is that those would have been far more interesting, in that tawdry, vulgar Clintonesque sense.

Personally, I wouldn't want to know the contents of notes exchanged between Clinton and Madeleine Albright. (A chill just went through me.)

On a serious note, I think it's troubling that a photographer is snapping pictures of jottings between the President and the Secretary of State. Something far more sensitive could have been in the note. I guess that was Wilking's hope.

"Annan is a major league a**hole" would have been newsworthy.

Putting out a photo of a note about a presidential "bathroom break" is just cheap and disrespectful.

If that's what Reuters considers to be appropriate for its photo wire, why did they fail to provide more of the details?

What did Condi do in response?

Why didn't Wilking leak the rest of this pressing story?

The next day, it came out that Wilking wasn't responsible for the photo's release. It was photo editor Gary Hershorn who called the shot.

Photo District News explained how the infamous photo came to be and made it on the wire.

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.

...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."

Nooooooo. Of course not.

There was nothing malicious at all about slapping that photo on the wire for worldwide distribution.

Now, Reuters has another winner.

This one didn't require Photoshop to produce. This one was the result of photographer Larry Downing's careful framing, or possibly some creative cropping.

On the photo wire--



The caption running with this photo reads:

U.S. Vice President Dick Cheney speaks during his keynote address to the U.S. Labor Department's 2006 National Summit on Retirement Savings at the Willard Hotel in Washington March 2, 2006. REUTERS/Larry Downing

Obviously, the photo was taken or cropped to include the word "retire" above the Vice President's head. Based on Cheney's placement within the frame of the photo, there is no conceivable explanation for the appearance of the word other than a conscious decision by someone at Reuters to make an editorial statement.

When Hershorn was covering up for the "Bush Leak" photo, he insisted that there was no malice. He said, "That's not what we do."

That's not true. Malice is exactly what Reuters does.

Busted!