BEFORE the American news media's collective shrug consigns the Reuters photo scandal to the nether world of shabby journalistic footnotes, one of this affair's wider implications is worth a moment's exploration.
The incident began when Los Angeles-based blogger Charles Johnson and one of his readers detected a freelance photographer for the Reuters news agency manipulating pictures of the fighting in Lebanon. They, along with other online press monitors, soon turned up not only doctored images, but also numerous staged and falsely captioned pictures by various photographers -- all designed to incite outrage against Israel. Reuters fired Adnan Hajj, the photojournalist involved, and purged its digital archives of more than 400 images he had sold them. The agency also said that, in the future, a more senior editor would review photos from Lebanon before they are transmitted to Reuters' clients.
That's all well and good, but the lingering question is how these patently phony pictures were distributed in the first place and why they weren't detected by the news organizations that received them? (It's certainly possible that some photo editors spotted them, raised their eyebrows in suspicion, tossed the images away and moved on without saying anything. That's another issue and outside the scope of this discussion.)
To consider one of the most troubling of the Reuters debacle's possible causes -- the way cost-cutting opened the way to manipulation, whatever its motive -- it's helpful to take a long step back and to note a couple of quotes from a story that appeared in the New York Times' business section early this week.
The article was a profile of the E.W. Scripps media company, currently something of a darling among investors. Along with profitably frothy cable television franchises -- such as HGTV and the Food Network -- the company still owns 21 U.S. newspapers. As the paper reported, "John Morton, a veteran newspaper analyst, says that Scripps Newspapers, the company's newspaper unit, 'does not get high marks for its journalism.' He added, however, that its cash-flow margins -- 28.9% in the second quarter -- were among the highest in the industry."
For that reason, Morton's analysis of the Scripps papers' quality didn't faze Thomas A. Russo, a partner in an investment firm whose clients hold E.W. Scripps stock. "In order to make money in newspapers," he told the Times, "you want to cover promos, potlucks and police blotters. The last thing you want to hear about is Pulitzers. And Scripps has done a great job."
