Attacking the messenger

Photojournalism has been rocked by a number of scandals recently as front-page photos have been repeatedly exposed as fakes or staged photos. David Perlmutter takes the issue seriously. By contrast, Greg Mitchell, the editor of the Editor & Publisher trade magazine, takes a different approach. He attacks the bloggers who exposed the problem:

One day last week I spent an entertaining ten minutes examining a long thread at one blog in which most of the posters were convinced that, for some unfathomable reason, a very dark-skinned Lebanese man in one photo MUST have been pasted into the scene -- for everyone knows (?) Arabs are never that dark.

I saw several discussions of that photo and they had nothing to do with the man's race and everything to do with suspicious photoshop-like artifacts around his head in the image.

Reuters has admitted to a real fauxtography problem by withdrawing over 900 photos. Mr. Mitchell prefers instead to ignore the actual issue in this particular photo and instead accusing the bloggers of being racists. This self-delusion reminds me of Mr. Laurence below.

Much more on this subject here,