RAND SIMBERG on the Reuters scandal and journalistic dishonesty:

First, it wasn’t the first time that such fakery has occurred in the so-called mainstream media, and the phenomenon doesn’t seem to be random, as it might be if it were a simple mistake, or breakdown in the vetting process. The fabricated images always seem to have the effect, intended or otherwise, of propagandizing against the West (in this case, the state of Israel, in the other example, President Bush).

The second thing that was disturbing is that, also like the previous cases, it took bloggers to point out what should have been an obvious tampering with the photo. Are major media editors really that incompetent (which gets back, of course, to disturbing concern Numero Uno)? This last isn’t an unreasonable question, given that this is the news agency that famously said that “one man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter.”

While Reuters deserves credit for immediately announcing to their distributors that the photo was questionable, and cutting off any further contributions from the (Arab) free-lance photographer who provided it, there is, actually, a third disturbing thing about it — what it presages for the future.

Read the whole thing.