…Photo editors in the U.S. variously blamed themselves and AFP, a respected photo agency, for not catching the photo.
“AFP should have caught it, really,” says Tim Rasmussen, assistant managing editor for photography at the Denver Post, which ran the photo on A1. “It should never have gotten past them.”
But another Post editor was miffed that he failed to catch it. “Oh, I hate days like this,” said Ken Lyons, the paper’s front-page photo editor. “It was right there in front of me. I should have seen it.” …
Catching some of the heat Thursday was Getty Images, which distributes AFP in the U.S. Getty director of photography Pancho Bernasconi says the AFP content arrives through an automatic feed and Getty does not edit it.
Some newspapers made it clear in their captions or credit lines that the photo was provided by the Iranian government. Others did not. The Denver Post ran the image as its lead art and credited it to AFP/Getty; the Baltimore Sun ran the photo on page 1 and credited it to Agence France Presse.
Early Thursday on the East Coast, more than 12 hours after the AFP image had been distributed, the Associated Press moved a nearly identical photo showing three missiles. It appears to have been photographed a fraction of a second apart from the AFP image. In a news story, the AP said it obtained the photo from the same Iranian Web site from which the AFP obtained theirs.
The first person to call foul on the photo appears to have been the political blog Little Green Footballs, which spotted the manipulation Wednesday. It took until Thursday for word to spread widely through sites like The Drudge Report and The New York Times. The AFP correction ran shortly after 9 a.m. Thursday on the East Coast.

UPDATE July 17: A reader wrote in to note that militaryphotos.net, not Little Green Footballs, was the first “to call foul” on the photo. You can read the post here. Thanks, Dominik!

And here are the corrections I’ve seen thus far (AFP corrected/retracted its image on Thursday):

On Page 1 Thursday, a photo released by the Iranian government accompanying a story about Iran’s test-firing of missiles was apparently digitally manipulated to include four missiles. Another image was released Thursday that shows three missiles. A story about the photo appears on Page 12. Link

A photograph of the test firing of missiles released by the public relations arm of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards, Sepah News, which ran on the front page of yesterday’s editions of The Sun had been digitally altered. The Sun was unaware of this manipulation. The photograph above is the correct image, which shows one missile remaining in the launcher. Link

Iran missile test: A photo from Iran’s Revolutionary Guard that accompanied an article in Thursday’s Section A about the country’s test of medium- and long-range missiles apparently was digitally altered to show four missiles successfully launching. It later became clear that the original photo showed only three rockets. News coverage on A1 and A4. Link

A related correction:

In some broadcasts, we did not note that the Web site Little Green Footballs had posted an item Wednesday evening declaring that the photograph of the Iranian missile launch had been doctored — before The New York Times published its analysis Thursday morning. Link

Last week, SPIEGEL ONLINE published an article about IKEA products named after Danish cities. We regret that we must retract the article because of inaccurate reporting. We apologize for the error.
In the article originally published at this address, SPIEGEL falsely reported that Danish researchers Klaus Kjøller and Trøls Mylenberg had conducted a “thorough analysis” of the naming conventions at Swedish furniture maker IKEA. In fact, Kjøller was approached by a journalist from the free daily Nyhedsavisen who had inquired about why apparently inferior IKEA products had been given the names of Danish towns.
Kjøller answered the question, but says he was very surprised by the “extremely exaggerated” article that appeared on the cover of Nyhedsavisen the following day, which would later get picked up by other media in Denmark and abroad, including SPIEGEL ONLINE.
“The story sounds good, but it unfortunately isn’t true,” Kjøller told SPIEGEL ONLINE on Monday. The author of the article and the editorial staff failed to contact Kjøller prior to the publication of the article.
SPIEGEL ONLINE strives to adhere to the highest standards of reporting and apologizes to its readers for the error, which we deeply regret.
– The Editors

Thanks, Ole!

The Books of The Times review in The Arts on Feb. 26 and an article in House & Home on Thursday described the experiences of Margaret B. Jones, who said that she had been a foster child and gang member in South Central Los Angeles and survived to write a book about that life. “Margaret B. Jones” turned out to be a pseudonym, and her story a complete fabrication, as The Times reported on Tuesday. An article about how her publisher, and the newspaper, failed to discover the truth earlier appears today. Link

Roy Greenslade has the background on the above image:

This award-winning photograph, showing a herd of endangered Tibetan antelopes apparently undisturbed by a passing train on the controversial Qinghai-Tibet railway, has been exposed as a fake. The image was widely hailed in China as a symbol of harmonious co-existence between man and nature. But photographer Liu Wei-qiang admitted it was a fabrication after commenters on a Chinese online photography forum questioned its authenticity.
“The train was real, and so were the antelopes,” said Liu in a posting on the forum. “But the magic moment just didn’t happen even after I had waited for two weeks.” Therefore, he decided to merge together one picture of a passing train with another of the migrating animals “to raise the public awareness of antelope protection”.
The merged picture was published by more than 200 media outlets around the world and won Liu a bronze medal in the 2006 Most Influential News Photos of the Year competition, sponsored by CCTV, China’s state television. Liu has now been dismissed from the Daqing Evening News in Heilongjiang province.

Changes in diction: If the vocabulary of an otherwise amateurish student writer or cliche-ridden hack journalist should abruptly grow sophisticated, lifting is likelier than an infusion from the muse.

Changes in syntax: Same thing. If a writer who struggles to cobble together a noun and a verb suddenly masters the compound-complex sentence, with attendant Ciceronian participial ornaments, it’s time to start looking elsewhere.

Specialized information: Ask Howard Baker’s question from the Watergate hearings of beloved memory: What did he know, and when did he know it? Sudden access to biographical details, historical information, ecclesiastical terminology or scientific or medical expertise has to have come from somewhere. Demand an explanation of the source.

Dubious sources: Any article based on a single source is automatically suspect — how can you tell that the source wasn’t lying? Where’s the confirmation? Similarly, anything based on second- or third-hand sources demands scrutiny. In addition, readers are justifiably suspicious of anonymous sources. Even when anonymity has been granted for good reason, such as the source’s reasonable fear of physical or economic injury, the writer should be obliged to reveal the source to the assigning editor, acquire supporting information, and give the reader as much information as is prudent about the anonymous source’s credibility.

Improbabilities: When Jack Kelly filed his famous story with USA Today about seeing, in the aftermath of a bombing, human heads rolling down the street, their eyelids still blinking, it would have been a good thing for the paper if an editor had said, “What the hell?” and followed up. In journalism, as in investment offers, if it looks too good to be true. …

Here’s more great advice about how to follow up if you suspect plagiarism or fabrication, and what to do if your discover it:

Your job is to be skeptical, not gullible. Any writer’s work ought to stand up to questioning, particularly about sourcing. So ask the questions.

As it happens, the very ease of theft that the Internet provides also offers ease of detection. Use Lexis-Nexis or Google to find information on the subject that the suspect article covers. Do searches on distinctive and anomalous phrases. (Some colleges and universities employ specialized software and run term papers through it.) Check it out.

Follow up. The first question that must always be asked when a plagiarism is detected is this: Has he/she done this before? This has to be checked out, but it won’t be unless you, who have detected the misdeed, report it to someone in authority.

Don’t agonize over fear of appearing to be an informer. If the instance you identify is a first-time mistake made out of ignorance, you may save a colleague’s career. If it turns out to be one in a pattern of lies, then the career wasn’t worth saving.

Seriously, this should be handed out to every editor in every newsroom.

Last Tuesday I carried a report headlined 11 relatives of Iraqi journalist killed. It now transpires that the story, widely carried in the United States, was false. Dhia al-Kawaz, editor of the Jordan-based Asawat al-Iraq news agency, has since admitted that his claim that gunmen had killed 11 of his family members in Baghdad was untrue. In fact, only his brother-in-law was killed in a single incident. His family say he lied in order to get his family refugee status in Jordan.

More here.

We’ll skip to the punchline, which is contained at the very end of a very long article:

In retrospect, we never should have put Beauchamp in this situation. He was a young soldier in a war zone, an untried writer without journalistic training. We published his accounts of sensitive events while granting him the shield of anonymity–which, in the wrong hands, can become license to exaggerate, if not fabricate.

When I last spoke with Beauchamp in early November, he continued to stand by his stories. Unfortunately, the standards of this magazine require more than that. And, in light of the evidence available to us, after months of intensive re-reporting, we cannot be confident that the events in his pieces occurred in exactly the manner that he described them. Without that essential confidence, we cannot stand by these stories.

We’ve read many retractions and editor’s notes over the last few years, and this is among the longest and most detailed. On its face, that’s a plus. Serious incidents are too often explained away with just a few sentences, and many details are left out. TNR has offered up a retelling of how concerns were raised about Beauchamp’s writing, and how the magazine responded to those concerns. But that doesn’t make it a completely satisfying account and explanation.

It takes Foer several thousand words to arrive at the above paragraphs; he’s buried the lede.

The lede also itself lacks a suitably blunt admission of retraction, an expression of regret, and an explanation of how the magazine will alter its policies and procedures to prevent this from happening again. Also, nowhere in the lengthy piece does Foer apologize to readers; in fact, he makes a point of opening with what seems like a dig at the Weekly Standard reporter who first raised concerns: “I didn’t know him or his byline.”

Foer takes other media to task for jumping to conclusions and explains how the military made it difficult for TNR to complete its re-reporting. Okay, interesting background. The outside pressures certainly made it difficult, but they’re not the focus at this point. The articles have been retracted — that’s the bottom line. TNR has to take its lumps and not appear as if it’s trying to spread blame.

As Maggie Shnayerson of Gawker noted earlier today:

Foer ought to have taken a page from the Chuck Lane School of Apologia. In 1998, when addressing TNR readers in the wake of the Stephen Glass scandal, the magazine’s 500-word piece concluded simply: “We offer no excuses for any of this. Only our deepest apologies to all concerned.”

Foer’s piece isn’t exactly a glossing over of the issue, but it hits several wrong notes and almost feels as if the final truth of retraction has been buried underneath an avalanche of expository writing. A simple, frank admission and expression of regret at the top of the piece would have made the important facts clear. Then the interesting background would be just that: background

In a Nov. 13 story, The Associated Press incorrectly reported that Paris Hilton was praised by conservationists for highlighting the problem of binge-drinking elephants in northeastern India. Lori Berk, a publicist for Hilton, said she never made any comments about helping drunken elephants in India.

From the original article:

GAUHATI, India (AP) — With Rwanda off her charity calendar, Paris Hilton has turned her attention to the plight of … drunken elephants in India.
“The elephants get drunk all the time. It is becoming really dangerous. We need to stop making alcohol available to them,” the 26-year-old socialite was quoted as saying by the World Entertainment News Network’s Web site.
In the wake of her jail term for an alcohol-related reckless driving case, Hilton is seeking to remake her image from club-hopping party girl to world-traveling do-gooder. She announced plans to do charity work in Rwanda, but the trip was postponed until next year.
Then opportunity for Hilton’s “global elephant campaign” knocked last month when six parched pachyderms broke into a farm in the state of Meghalaya and guzzled farmers’ homemade rice beer. The elephants went on a rampage, then uprooted an electricity pole and were jolted to death…

WENN is not exactly a reliable outlet when it comes to celebrity scoops. We’ve published  two previous posts about salacious WENN stories that were later retracted. See here and here.  AP and other media outlets should not be publishing “scoops” from WENN without doing some independent verification.

Following that first revelation, we began to dig deeper into Parker’s work. On Friday, Oct. 19, we realized that a community profile she had written — and which had been prepared for Friday publication before Thursday’s revelations — also was suspect. The story profiled Andrew Koch and identified him as a University of Virginia student and a Cavaliers fan. A photo was included. At 8:52 a.m. someone who identified himself as Andrew Koch came onto our newspaper forums and said that while his name and photo were used on the profile, he was not a University of Virginia student, a Cavalier’s fan and he had not vacationed in Cancun. He said that despite the use of his name and image, he was not the subject of the article. He said the photo was identical to one on a website at James Madison University, where he works. We could not locate a student Andrew Koch at U.Va. and on Saturday (Oct. 20) ran a correction stating that the profile was false.

The editor then details four more incidents of plagiarism and/or fabrication. Parker has owned up to her transgressions. “When asked about the problems in the deer-hunting story on Thursday, Parker told Publisher Roger Watson and me that she took full responsibility for her actions,” writes David Frtiz. “On Tuesday, she admitted the other fabrications and offered no explanation.”
He concludes with an apology:

So I apologize to you for the actions of our reporter. Our goal from the first sign of wrongdoing was to quickly and transparently understand the scope of the problem and to take firm action. It’s our responsibility to our readers. I also apologize that we didn’t figure it out sooner.

Here are two corrections published by the paper before it fired Parker:

The reporting for a local profile on Page A4 Friday cannot be verified. The photo that ran with it is of an Andrew Koch, but that Andrew Koch was not interviewed for the piece. Because of this, we retract the entire profile. The work of Blair J. Parker, the reporter who prepared the profile, is under review by The News Leader. That section of A4 was prepared early on Thursday, before questions were raised about her other work. More information will be released once the investigation is complete. Link

A Thursday B1 story about the fall deer and trout seasons by Blair J. Parker was plagiarized from several sources. We have confirmed that large portions of the story came from other sources and that facts within the story were incorrect, thus we retract the article in its entirety.
We are beginning a thorough investigation of Parker’s work since she joined the newspaper in 2006. Plagiarism and knowingly publishing inaccurate information violates The News Leader’s Principles of Ethical Conduct, a commitment to you that we take very seriously. We will report our findings once the investigation is complete
— David Fritz, executive editor Link

We can’t locate the original.

A deep apology is in order to Peetz girls head coach Kristen Hamil and her team as she was completely misquoted in Monday’s report of Peetz and Merino. In fact, I never spoke to the coach after the game nor over the phone about the game. To quote her on false information is simply poor reporting on my part and I sincerely apologize to coach Hamil, the Lady Bulldogs, and the Peetz athletic department. Link

It’s dishonest to call it a misquote. By his own admission, he didn’t speak with the coach. That means it’s fabrication.