This leaves me absolutely speechless. The dirty, filthy, shit-sucking liars. More here, here, and here.

They see only what they want to see, and they tell us only what they want us to know. They conspire to conceal the truth, use unethical trickery to advance an unwholesome agenda, lie when caught at it, and never, ever own up to their own blatantly obvious bias.

Knowing all this for the incontrovertible truth that it is, can anyone explain to me why the MSM has even the merest tatterdemalion shred of credibility with anyone anymore?

Update! At the end of the post linked above, Harrell says:

Michelle notes in her post that this story got picked up by the Web site Digg, and that one of the people who left a comment there said that it’s all gonna come down to how Reuters responds. Of course, Digg is a site where just anybody can sign up to leave a comment, which means you also get to see things like this: “I can’t stand the nerve of Israelis to accuse someone of adding smoke to a picture when they already killed hundreds of innocent civilians. This is the REAL smoke screen.”

Is it just me, or is that just “fake but accurate” wrapped up in a new set of clothes?

It ain’t just you, Jeff. It’s the Lying Left, resorting to their usual moronic moral equivalence in revolting indulgence of their usual bat-blind Jew-hate.

Folks, I hate to break this to you, but it really doesn’t matter very much now what happened in Beirut. Now the story is that a photojournalist — or his editor, or whomever it turns out to be — faked a photo, and that Reuters ran it on their wire. Once you start just making stuff up, the argument is over. You’ve lost.

Ahh yes, but the Left and their worthless MSM poodles are too stupid, too dishonest, or too obstinate in both to ever admit to it, to themselves or anyone else. Expect plenty of excuse-making, big-D Denial, and changing of the subject yet to come from the purblind oxygen thieves, before they just tune out altogether and get back into protest mode — even though Reuters has already pulled the photo. After all, there are still some people (an alarmingly large number of them, actually) who believe in the veracity of the story that spawned the phrase “fake but accurate” in the first place.

Updated update! Ace:

I don’t want to oversell this, but this could be Rathergate II: The Revenge, that we’ve all been waiting for.

It’s not just this one picture. It is the MSM’s “outsourcing” of most foreign news coverage to low-paid, low-experience, low-credentials, foreign “local” stringers who almost certainly have a very strong personal interest in 1) juicing their stories and pictures to make sure they sell and 2) advancing a political goal of slandering Israel that most Muslims, sadly, seem to share.

It would be one thing if, given economic realities, Reuters et al. did this but made sure they applied some very serious vetting to this material back at the home office.

But they don’t. Whatever pictures come across their desks — the obviously propagandized pictures from Qana, this absurd doctoring of smoke plumes to make the wreckage in Beirut seem more extensive and dramatic and, most important of all, disproportionate — they simply publish without even the most basic scrutiny.

If this shoddy, crude forgery got past their vaunted “multiple layers of painstaking editorial fact-checking,” what in the world would not?

Too easy: anything even remotely pro-Israel, pro-American, or pro-WoT. They are liars. They are propagandists. Everything else proceeds from that.

It’s too soon for a victory lap. But I’m going to be taking it pretty soon, I think. I wrote a major scandal was on the way. We needed only unambiguous evidence of “journalistic” misconduct on the part of the stringers, and beyond-negligent behavior by the home office of a news organization in putting obvious, shoddy doctored photos out to the world.

We just got exactly that.

We sure did. And in the end, it’s not going to matter a damn. The liberals will keep right on whining about Israel’s “disproportionate” response to Hezbollah’s understandable action on behalf of those poor, poor downtrodden Palestinians, and the suffering of so many Lebanese Hezbollah sympathizers and enablers. Israeli civilian deaths will continue to be ignored, even though this whole thing is entirely and exclusively Hezbollah’s doing. And ultimately it will all be blamed on the righteous and justified “rage” of the “Arab street,” for the US’s war crime of proactively defending itself against insane religious fundamentalist killers and one of their most overt and dangerous sponsors, Saddam’s Iraq.

But maybe this will wake up another small handful of people who have been sitting on the fence till now, although I truly can’t imagine that there’s any of those left.

Update to the updated update! Damned apt comment from Billy Hollis:

Reuters says they are going to suspend the photographer. Which means nothing because he can merely submit the work through some other terrorist-sympathizing intermediary.

That’s the part the gets my goat. The only way Reuters could really make amends is to alter their entire attitude about the parties involved. And there’s zero chance of that.

They’ll keep on giving the terrorists, oops, I mean the “militants”, the benefit of the doubt no matter how many times they get manipulated. And they’ll continue to hold Israel and BushCo to extraordinary levels of scrutiny.

I can understand being a bit cynical about Western governments (who isn’t?). But to be continually and obviously manipulated by third-world medieval savages and to be proud of the result – I just don’t get it. Do they have no sense of self-image that would make them ashamed of that?

Apparently not. Well put anyway, Billy.