AP also distributed this photographic comparison of the original and the doctored image:

And here’s a related correction from the Waterloo Region Record in Canada. It published the doctored photo:

The Associated Press distributed a picture showing the mayor of Vilnus, Lithuania, riding in an armoured personnel carrier and flattening a car on a downtown street to dramatize an anti-parking campaign. Upon learning the photo had been doctored by the mayors office to remove other people on the tank, the news service withdrew the photo from its system and archives. The Record ran this photo in the news section on August 4.

*Correction August 22, 2011: The original headline on this post was “AP retracts photo of car crushing mayor.” As pointed out in an error report on MediaBugs, the lack of hyphen “makes it sound as though a car is crushing the mayor, not the other way around.” True. I added the hyphen, and I regret the error.

The photograph showing President Barack Obama and staffers in the White House Situation Room carefully watching the raid in progress by US forces in Pakistan on the bin Laden compound last Sunday has been published far and wide.
One Hassidic paper in Brooklyn, however, has chosen to alter the photo – excising Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and another female staffer from the picture.
First reported in the blog failedmessiah.typepad.com, the photoshopped picture was published in the Yiddish newspaper Der Zeitung (The Time) on Friday, with empty spaces where Clinton had been sitting and where the female staffer had stood …

The image:

Thanks, Miranda!

Update May 9: The paper has apologized. An excerpt from the Washington Post, which has the full apology at the end of this post:

In accord with our religious beliefs, we do not publish photos of women, which in no way relegates them to a lower status… Because of laws of modesty, we are not allowed to publish pictures of women, and we regret if this gives an impression of disparaging to women, which is certainly never our intention. We apologize if this was seen as offensive.

Update May 12: Failed Messiah revealed that yet another ultra-Orthodox paper in Brooklyn did the same thing. This time is was De Voch, which means “The Week”:

But that’s not all. It seems that even though they apologized for the photo manipulation, the editors at Zeitung are very unhappy about being caught. In a new issue, they refer to the former Orthodox Jew running Failed Messiah as a “rotten heretic lowlife.” The full headline and subhead read:

Global storm over modified White House photo
Unbelievable incitement when “a fardorbener yung” [“a rotten heretic lowlife”] publishes the photo that omitted Secretary of State Clinton

The new caption is still misleading, if you ask me. Why no “Photo illustration” label, or something similar?

Thanks, @andrewphelps!

Spanish sports daily AS has been forced to apologise after a "computer graphics error" saw it airbrush out a player in an image of a controversial offside decision.

Dani Alves set up David Villa's opening goal in Barcelona's 2-1 victory over Athletic Bilbao last Sunday but there was some suggestion that he might have been offside when he received the ball from team-mate Xavi.

However, AS seemed to leave its readers in no doubt that Alves WAS offside in its Monday print edition as the paper's  photo of the incident saw the last Athletic Bilbao defender mysteriously absent from the shot.

The paper was forced to correct the error with a "before and after" screengrab of the respective photos to set the record straight (see below).

"Pedimos disculpas por un error en la infografía del 1-0," was the headline which translates to: "We apologise for the error in the computer graphics in the 1-0 incident." …

Thanks, Steve!

In fact, the people shown were museum staff members, who were asked by museum officials to be present in the galleries to provide scale and context for the photographs. The photographer acknowledged using the same procedure in other cases when an exhibition was not yet opened to the public.

Such staging of news pictures violates The Times’s standardsand the photographs should not have been published. (While pictures may show previews or similar situations before an exhibition opens, readers should not be given a misleading impressionabout the circumstances.) Link

He said he was in the press tent processing the images when Bettencourt and his caddie stopped by to see some of the pictures. Feldman said the caddie, looking at the image in question, said it would be better if he wasn’t in it. “So I showed them how easy I could do that. I thought I just saved it to the desktop, not to the send folder,” he said. “I certainly did not mean to send both of them to Getty.”
“There was absolutely no intent to pass this off as a real image. Only a moron would have sent both,” he said. “And I would’ve done it a lot better too.”

This kind of reminds me of the story of how Clyde Haberman was fired by the New York Times. (He of course went on to have a distinguished career at the paper.) Here’s how Haberman recounted his firing by the legendary A.M. Rosenthal:

… In 1966, Abe was this paper’s metro editor.
I was its campus correspondent at City College of New York.
Abe had held the same position a generation earlier.
Like me, he had grown up in the Bronx.
He was a New Yorker through and through; never mind that he was born in Canada.
In those days, The Times published excruciatingly long lists of commencement awards presented by City College and Columbia University.
As I typed away, growing progressively more bored, I committed what would soon seem an act of career seppuku.
I invented a fake prize.
The Brett Award, I called it, “to the student who has worked hardest under a great handicap — Jake Barnes.”
You can read, or reread, Hemingway’s “Sun Also Rises” to catch the salacious reference.
The bogus award took up three lines of tiny type in the newspaper, the kind you see in baseball box scores.
But everything, no matter how insignificant, is bound to be read by somebody.
My prank certainly was.
When he learned about it, Abe lost no time summoning me to the office.
That day, the various Abes were on display.
The Old Testament Abe thundered about how I had made “a jackass” of him and the newspaper.
Never would I write for The Times again.
Never.
But there was also Abe the consoler, sad to let me go …

The lesson being that you don’t invent a fake while on company time. You never know where it’ll end up, and what it will cost you.

Check out what the “mandatory kill” order from Getty looked like:

And this is part of the caption that was added: “Attention editors: Image GYI0061084390.jpg was sent to you in error. Please do not use the image and remove it from your systems. We regret the error and apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.”

Thanks, David!

We get a lot of letters at National Geographic. Recently we received several from readers insisting that William Lascelles’s photograph on the February 2010 Your Shot page was a fake.
Our readers were right.
The Your Shot rules specify, “Please provide only the original, unmodified camera image.”
Lascelles submitted a nicely composed picture showing a scruffy dog backed by jets inscribing trails in a blue sky. After he learned that it had been chosen for the magazine, Lascelles told our writer that frame was “a lucky shot.” He confirmed that statement for our researcher. When Senior Photo Editor Susan Welchman asked him, prior to publication, to verify the image with the next photo in his shooting sequence, Lascelles sent her another picture of the dog—head turned this time—with the same jets above.
It turned out to be a fake, too.
William Lascelles has now admitted that he fabricated both images he sent us. We apologize for publishing his picture. And we thank our readers for speaking up.
“Your Shot shooters give me the weather, the news, holidays, their births, deaths, and the crazy things they do every day. They hunt down images that mean something to them,” says Welchman, who looks at some 300 Your Shot photographs every day. “That’s what Your Shot is supposed to be. It’s real moments of real people in real life.”
So go on out into the world and capture what you see. It’ll be better than anything you can make up and paste together on a computer screen. We hope you’ll keep sending us your shots. We want to see what is real.

Thanks, Morgan!

A report from the Southampton Press:

The photograph depicts Brookhaven Town Councilman Keith Romaine as being present at a July 2 news conference at Smith Point County Park that he did not, in fact, attend. It appeared in the July 8 issue of The South Shore Press, a weekly newspaper serving the Tri-Hamlet community.

The original photograph was distributed with a press release issued by Suffolk County Legislator Kate Browning’s office shortly after the press conference, at which county and town officials, including Brookhaven Supervisor Mark Lesko, announced that they had reached a deal to replace and maintain missing buoys directing boaters from the Smith Point Marina to the Great South Bay.

A reprinted version of the press release also was published in The South Shore Press, although it was altered to add Mr. Romaine’s name twice to the article, depicting him as being present at the press conference and helping to broker the deal with Ms. Browning and Mr. Lesko. The photograph was retouched to include an image of Mr. Romaine, as if he were present when the photo at the press conference was taken.

Both Ms. Browning and Mr. Lesko said this week that Mr. Romaine did not contribute to the settlement…

The newspaper’s director of sales and marketing, Fred Towle Jr., a former Suffolk County legislator who resigned from his county post in 2003 after pleading guilty to receiving bribes in office, acknowledged this week that the paper altered the photograph. He defended the practice, noting that he had received competing press releases and photographs from both Mr. Romaine and Ms. Browning and was attempting to combine the two.

He said he saw nothing wrong with adding Mr. Romaine to the photograph. “Yes, we did it,” he said. “It’s not like we intentionally removed someone from a photo—that would have been questionable.”

Uh, wrong. The story includes quotes from ethics experts:

According to the code of ethics formulated by the Society for Professional Journalists, a not-for-profit organization that according to its website is “dedicated to encouraging the free practice of journalism and stimulating high standards of ethical behavior,” one of the primary ethical standards for journalists is to “seek truth and report it.”

In that mission, The South Shore Press appears to have failed, according to Andy Schotz, chairman of the organization’s ethics committee.

“My breath was taken away when it was described to me,” Mr. Schotz said of the photograph. “You might have good intention, but we’re after truth. If it didn’t happen, you’re not reporting truth.”

He said that while many publications print photo illustrations in an attempt to make a story more clear, they typically take great pains to make it clear to the reader that it was not an actual photograph.

“Your responsibility is to the readers,” he said. “You don’t try to confuse your readers, you go out of your way to explain everything to your readers. There’s a trust relationship. The role that we have is to collect facts … people have faith in that and they rely on that.”

Jim Klurfeld, a visiting professor of journalism at Stony Brook University who served as the editorial page editor for Newsday for 40 years, agreed.

“If you’re going to print something for artistic reasons, it has to be labeled a photo illustration,” he said, recalling a time when Newsday editors took heat for a front-cover shot of Nancy Kerrigan and Tonya Harding on a skating rink together, an event that never actually occurred. “If there’s any confusion, you can’t use it. The only thing you have in a newspaper is your credibility. Why else would you read a newspaper if it’s not to get accurate information, the truth?”

Thanks, Steve!

A photographer whose work appeared in the New York Times Magazine has been accused of digitally manipulating his images. Edgar Martins produced a photo essay entitled "Ruins of the Second Gilded Age." It showed abandoned buildings/construction projects and was featured in the magazine and on the Times website. After commenters on MetaFilter raised questions about the authenticity of the images, the magazine pulled the slideshow from the website and inserted this text in its place:

Editors’ Note: July 7, 2009
The pictures in this feature were removed after questions were raised about whether they had been digitally altered.

Adam Gurno, a MetaFilter user, is being given credit for helping expose the manipulations. He’s posted some evidence on his personal website and also did an interview with Minnesota Public Radio:

"It was an excellent photo essay," he told me this afternoon. "The picture of the framing is actually pretty striking. I looked at it and I said, ‘this doesn’t look right.’"

Gurno says he sent his proof to the Times but he only got a form e-mail in return. Nonetheless, the Times has removed the photo essay from its Web site.

How the ethical lapse came to light should be a warning to all journalists.

"When you work in computer programming…there’s a maxim in the programming world that says ‘all bugs are shallow to 10,000 eyes.’ It means if you have something open source and you let 10,000 people look at it, they’re going to find all the little things about it. Everybody’s going to approach it from a slightly different angle. And I think it’s the same with this picture," he said.

"I understand magazines Photoshop models on their covers and that’s neither here nor there. But when they actually call it ‘journalism,’ that’s when I decided to dig in a little bit extra," he said.

Gawker notes that Photo District News claims to have uncovered other examples of manipulation within the same photo essay. PDN also reprinted the text from the magazine that introduced the essay. Note the emphasis from PDN:

Last fall, The New York Times Magazine commissioned Edgar Martins, a 32-year-old Portuguese photographer based in London, to capture on film the physical evidence of the real estate bust in the United States. Martins, who creates his images with long exposures but without digital manipulation, traveled from rural Georgia to suburban California, visiting large construction projects that began during the speculative boom years and then came to a sudden halt, often half-finished, when the housing and securities markets collapsed.

Other media watchdogs are trying to get an official comment from the Times.

My guess is the magazine is examining the photos and talking with the photographer, and that it will publish a more detailed Editors’ Note once it makes a final determination. At this point the general consensus seems to be that the photos were altered, but the magazine and photographer have yet to confirm this. Either way, they should move quickly to make a more detailed statement. The story has already taken shape and doesn’t look good for the magazine.

UPDATE July 9: The Times has acknowledged that the images were altered by the photographer. As expected, here’s the Editors’ Note:

A picture essay in The Times Magazine on Sunday and an expanded slide show on NYTimes.com titled “Ruins of the Second Gilded Age” showed large housing construction projects across the United States that came to a halt, often half-finished, when the housing market collapsed. The introduction said that the photographer, a freelancer based in Bedford, England, “creates his images with long exposures but without digital manipulation.”

A reader, however, discovered on close examination that one of the pictures was digitally altered, apparently for aesthetic reasons. Editors later confronted the photographer and determined that most of the images did not wholly reflect the reality they purported to show. Had the editors known that the photographs had been digitally manipulated, they would not have published the picture essay, which has been removed from NYTimes.com.

And a post on its Lens blog offers this admission, in addition to other background:

A picture essay in The Times Magazine on Sunday and an accompanying slide show on NYTimes.com, “Ruins of the Second Gilded Age,” have been found to include digital alterations. The photos showed unfinished or unoccupied construction projects around the United States that came to a halt — at least in part — because of the financial crisis. They were taken by Edgar Martins, a 32-year-old freelance photographer.

Thanks, Kevin!

…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