Posted on August 13, 2008 - by Venik
Reuters Published Fake Propaganda Photos
When people read news reports by Reuters, they expect a certain degree of objectivity and professionalism. Too often their expectations remain unfulfilled. The photos below have been floating in the blogosphere for the past few days. They depict the same individuals posing as Georgia soldiers and civilian victims of the “Russian aggression”.
Propaganda is nothing extraordinary in times of war. However, when PR spin doctor get sloppy, their own propaganda tricks turn against them. If the Georgians had to stage scenes of civilian casualties in Gori for the benefit of hapless Western journalists, what does this tell you about the actual extent of civilian casualties in the town?
Below is a Reuters photo of two Georgian soldiers carrying a wounded boy. It is interesting to note that the boy’s supposedly injured right leg, “bleeding” profusely from the thigh, seems to be supporting itself. The soldier on the right also appears on many of the photos below in various capacities.
Here is the photo of this “soldier” now in civilian clothing in a different location:
Here is another Reuters shot: the guy from the previous two photos is now dressed in black. Note the “victim” laying face-down on the ground: you will see him again.
In the Reuters photo below we see the “soldier” and the “victim” from the photos above. Reuters reported that the man was grieving for his dead brother. Apparently, before succumbing to grief, he decided to take his shirt off and put on a different pair of pants:
Finally, here is some BBC footage showing the “victim” from the two photos above being carried by Georgian soldiers at an entirely different location. Apparently he is still “alive”. Click on the image to see the video.
The problem with agencies like Reuters is that they use local photographers almost exclusively with little or no background verification. In the recent years there have been many cases of Reuters photographers misrepresenting or doctoring their photos. Apparently, these highly-publicized incidents were not enough to prompt Reuters to improve its quality standards.
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January 1, 0001
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August 13, 2008
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That screaming guy picture that was used on every frontpage on the planet screamed fake, thank for finding that out. I’ve also seen other casualty picture that are obviously staged, bad actors crying, old women dead on a picture, and looking good but with fake blood on the neck and shirt ( rolling down like corn syrup, not blood ), with the hundreads of real victims why are they stagings photos, the real suffering people are not photogenic enough? there’s of the wrong ethnic group maybe? I can’t belive our media are printing the pictures and the lies of this Goebbel-Adam Sandler hybrid dictator.
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August 13, 2008
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That screaming guy picture that was used on every frontpage on the planet screamed fake, thank for finding that out. I’ve also seen other casualty picture that are obviously staged, bad actors crying, old women dead on a picture, and looking good but with fake blood on the neck and shirt ( rolling down like corn syrup, not blood ), with the hundreads of real victims why are they stagings photos, the real suffering people are not photogenic enough? there’s of the wrong ethnic group maybe? I can’t belive our media are printing the pictures and the lies of this Goebbel-Adam Sandler hybrid dictator.
Ghyslain
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August 13, 2008
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Hello venik4. I see you still maintain your aeronautical website. I was linked here from theoildrum.com. I recall your great website that provided excellent detail of the US escalation of the Iraqi Holocaust. I’m quite happy you have this blog. Your info and detail are again A1. I found the Pravda editorial directed at Bush quite entertaining, yet unfortunate that it had to be written. Now I will explore some more and return more often!
Best,
karlof1
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August 13, 2008
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Good to hear from you too. I am glad a few people finally decided to stop by my humble blog
Unfortunately, I have not had the time to keep my aeronautics.ru site current. I am currently working to convert it to a database-driven format so its easier to update. Hopefully, you should see some new things there in a few weeks.
Venik
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August 14, 2008
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People of South Ossetia fight for their freedom and independence. Russia supports them. What’s wrong here?
The United States defeated Great Britain with help from France and Spain in the American Revolutionary War. The colonists’ victory at Saratoga in 1777 led the French into an open alliance with the United States. In 1781, a combined American and French Army, acting with the support of a French fleet, captured a large British army led by General Charles Cornwallis at Yorktown, Virginia. The surrender of General Cornwallis ended serious British efforts to find a military solution to their American problem.
The South Ossetia defeated Georgia with help from Russia in the Ossetian Revolutionary War… In 2008, a combined Ossetian and Russian Army, acting with the support of a Russian fleet, captured a large Georgian army…
If British had CNN in 1781, the USA would never happen…
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August 14, 2008
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I checked such details as skin color on the forearms and hair color and found significant differences for the different people in the different photos.
I assume the rest of the blog is as false as these allegations.
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August 14, 2008
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Don’t pretend to be an expert. To compare details like skin color in digital photos, you need to know technical specifications and details of the color-space processors used by the camera. You also need to know if there photos were taken by the same camera. In other words, you are full of crap.
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August 14, 2008
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So your hypothesis is that Reuters could not be bothered to use different Georgians for different sets of faked photos, but they did bother to alter subtle skin and hair color via Photoshop and/or different equipment ?
But they did not bother to alter the faces ?
Those are NOT the same guy. The resolution on the black suited guy is too low to properly ID, but the forearms simply do not match, and neither does the hair color.
Your hate blinds you.
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August 14, 2008
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It is absolutely the same guy on the photos. There is no doubt about it. The best-case scenario is that these scenes were staged for the benefit of the visiting reporters and Reuters photographers were not directly involved in the falsification. Unfortunately, Reuters ha s a questionable practice of hiring local photographers with little or no prior screening. It would be very easy for PR organization to plant one of their photographers in the local Reuters office, counting on the laziness of editors using the images in publications.
Nobody would bother altering these photos to make any skin color alterations that only you seem to be able to detect (perhaps it’s time to upgrade your monitor?), simply different cameras were used. Field photographers are known to carry three or more cameras with different focal-length lenses, so they don’t have to swap the lenses between shots. Swapping lenses takes time and causes dust to get on the SLR mirror.
I own two digital SLRs myself – one is Canon EOS 40D and the other one is Nikon D60. Obviously, the cameras use different CCDs with different color-space processors, resulting in slightly different colors. Another way to introduce an unintentional color variation is by using an uncalibrated RAW format conversion utility. Most field photographic postprocessing is done on a small laptop. Images are converted from RAW into a compact lossy format and transmitted via satellite to the editors for publication. High-resolution original are later added for magazine print publications.
Look it up, man. Or talk to a photo reporter.
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August 15, 2008
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Hey, is everyone in Marrero, Louisiana as stupid as you are or are you the village idiot? You wouldn’t be trolling from New Orleans NAS, would you? Because that would explain a lot, actually. And, what’s that, still using dialup? BTW, you may want to run a virus scan. The port you have open on your PC, you must have every trojan in the world installed on your computer.
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August 17, 2008
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journalist is named Jeroen Akkermans (white shirt). venik4 you are wrong.
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August 17, 2008
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I’m not at all sure I agree with the identity issues you raised, but to me the most stark incongruity is in the photo near the top with the boy. That doesn’t seem to be the face of a boy whose leg is injured so badly he has to be carried. Where’s the pain and anguish? He looks as if he could just as easily be going for ice cream.
And lower down, with the doctor and nurse carrying the wounded man, it certainly seems like she made an odd choice of footwear for a nurse. I can’t remember ever seeing a nurse wear open-toed clogs before, and the doctor seems to be wearing some sort of open-toed sandal as well. I won’t say it’s proof, but these seem like really odd choices in attire, or perhaps just not enough attention to detail by people trying to project a certain image to the world. Cheers.
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August 18, 2008
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These photos all seem to indicate, as our host says, staging in one form or another. There are some other places on the web to find examples of this kind of thing — deceptive shots designed to make the images more… of whatever the goal is (sympathetic, newsworthy, etc.)
However, I must agree with the anonymous message above – the soldier, the guy in light blue jeans, and the guy in dark pants and shirt standing by (apparently) calmly… They don’t look enough like each other that I’d believe they were the same person. I’m just using my eye, I didn’t even realize that was the claim until I read the comments — they don’t look much like each other to me. The soldier shot, I can’t compare very well, but the other two don’t seem the same to me at all.
I do find it curious that the guy in light blue jeans saw fit to remove (or add, since I can’t confirm timeline) 2 shirts between the pictures of him.
All that said, I don’t doubt for a second that we’re showing doctored photos on Reuters and other networks. FOX got busted doing it with a couple of altered photos of people they didn’t like just to make them look funnier. And I’m sure somewhere you could find stories of people working for CNN trumping up claims or photos for profit/career/whatever. Sadly, real journalists and their impartiality and integrity are like clean athletes — they still exist, but there’s so many examples to the contrary that you can’t trust any of them completely — which is sad.
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August 19, 2008
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Ah, you know and I know that the Georgians received terrible advice to hide the true extent of Russian attacks on Georgian military facilities. Both Russia and Georgia seem to be happy to conceal the extraordinary loss of life suffered by the Georgian ‘armed forces’ (which, in reality, means that plenty of Israeli, US and other mercenaries are going to have apparently died while on missions in ‘Afghanistan’ and ‘Iraq’ around the time Russia was clobbering Georgia).
Anyway, my point is that the Georgian government was hardly prepared to produce propaganda mitigating their military disaster, and by refusing to show images of the true scale of destruction (because most targets hit were military in nature) left the propaganda game in the hands of local amateurs and mainstream media troublemakers.
Myself, I am amazed in this Internet age at the degree to which Georgia and Russia were able to manage the visual coverage of the dispute. I assume the Georgians are low tech, or just too scared to make an honest record of the destruction of their military, and place in on the Internet. I never guessed that a war could be fought with such secrecy (yeah, it’s the talk of the planet, but real details seem as hard to come by as in the days before the Internet).
PS are you or your colleagues willing to reveal now the truth to the rumours that the US used nuclear weapons of some kind during their invasion of Iraq, especially in their capture of the major airport near Baghdad? I know Russia and the USA have a long history of keeping each others darkest secrets from the rest of the world, but times are changing rapidly. After the next presidential election, the USA will pursue an insane agenda that will unleash a global war, and time is rapidly running out to prevent this.
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August 19, 2008
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A couple days ago Russian military officials reported Russian combat losses at 174 killed. The general who made the announcement said that Georgia’s losses are at least ten times as high. Russia is not trying to hide Georgian losses, but Moscow sees no reason to advertise these losses either. Saakashvili, on the other hand, has every reason to conceal his army’s devastating losses. He knows his own nationalist parliament will not forget him the humiliation of this war.
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August 29, 2008
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you morans!
this pictures are all real ones and has nothing to do with reuters.
the man mourns his brother, whose wife also died in that moment.
the story about orphan boy was in “Thesun.co.uk”
his name is Gocha Razmadze
shame on you
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August 29, 2008
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THIS LINK IS AN ANSWER TO KGB MORANS WHO WANT TO PRETEND REAL TRAGEDY AS A FAKE PHOTOS
http://www.thesun.co.uk/sol/homepage/news/article1571763.ece
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August 29, 2008
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Are you seriously going to cite a British tabloid as proof of the photo’s authenticity? The article in The Sun is dated August 18. I posted the photos in my blog on August 13. And I found these photos on someone else’s site. The Sun just picked up this trash from the Web along with some sob-story. Zaza my ass. Чвени сакме самартлианиа, чвен гавимарджвебт.
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August 29, 2008
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I am from Georgia and I know the family of pregnant woman killed, whose husband was in the picture with mourning brother.
even if I did not know him, average person can see that there is no resemblence between the men in those pictures.
by the way this picture was used by KGB propaganda machine on youtube with the comment as if it was pictured in Tskhinvali and he was osetian guy.
it did not work and now KGB wants it’s fake pictures.
now go you moran and ask whoever ordered you to comment on this pictures how to reply to me.
why do not we discuss the fake pictures presented by General of “Fork thief Army” as if they found american passport in Tskhinvali. Bullshit
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August 29, 2008
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you KGB paid moran! listen to me!
I knew the pregnant girls family who died in gori bombing and whose husband is dead on the picture with mourning brother.
even if I did not the story, average person can tell that there is no resemblance between the men in these pictures.
by the way KGB propaganda tryied to use this picture on youtube pretending as if it was tskhinvali pictures and the mourning guy was osetian.
shame on everybody who makes money by declaring this tragedy as fake!
now go you idiot and ask whoever ordered you to pretend those tragedy fake and ask them how to reply to me.
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August 29, 2008
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KGB is gone, my friend. I think its time you and your nutcase president find a new bogeyman. The photos are obviously fake. This doesn’t mean, however, that there were no casualties in Gori. This is what happens when you elect a psychopath to run your country and he decides to start slaughtering his own citizens using artillery and rocket launchers. I guess, using American terminology, Gori is collateral damage. What goes around, comes around, buddy.
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August 30, 2008
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1: there is no former KGB agent, this was main doctrin of KGB. Once in KGB always in KGB. so is RICH President of the RICH country whose POOR soldiers are not ashamed to wear uniforms and pants from dead Georgian soldiers. here is youtube link to prove it.
when I say president I do not mean that funny marionet.
I hope this is not fake youtube videos
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kM50u6xdJas
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RhcP3XhWavc&feature=related
2. georgians did not start it. so called peacekeepers alowed and helped osetian bands to kill 6 georgian policman during a week before and 150 russian tanks were in osetia before the war started. even russians do deny it. you are the victim of kgb u do not know it?
3. kidev gaimeoreb mag suratebze kalbiao da me sheni dedis mutels movtknav, gaige?
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August 30, 2008
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Yes, Georgians were the victims with howitzers, MLRS, tanks, and bombers. Fine. Now go back to your corner.
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August 30, 2008
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when you avoid topics with general reply, it means you have nothing to say against the steel truth!
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