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   Those are 3 of the cleanest soldiers I've ever seen. Must be the first day of the war.

Yeah and I have to ask myself, what's manipulated, except that it's a staged photo? Someone tell me?

Also it's in the tenants of editorial that cropping must not change the meaning of the situation. Maybe the person who wrote the headline is the one guilty of what they are accusing.  

Caption for the photo, in English says:

I don’t know if these shots were taken from an actual photojournalism, or were they just used as a theoretical example, but either way consider this a pretty powerful demonstration. See for yourself how our our perception can be easily shaped, and manipulated with by the media. I believe it isn’t necessary to explain this optical illusion. Photos speak for themselves. Imagine you worked for an administration that wants you to show how soldiers have no mercy when it comes to war. You would use the cropped picture on your left in that case. However, if you worked for the other side, and wanted to depict soldiers as human beings, you would crop the right part of the original photo. There you have it! Such powerful example amazes me, but in the same time scares the sh*t out of me. Which makes me think, should we be more skeptic to stories medias bombard us with?

First off, it's not an optical illusion. Second it's a distortion of the truth. OK I'll admit that sometimes the media does that, but propaganda is what it is, and that's not responsible journalism. The media has a moral obligation to report the facts and the news without distortions or bias. Doesn't mean they always do, but that's the basis for responsible photojournalism.

Very flawed argument and logic on this hypothetical accusation.

Reuters is the poster child for photo abuse and caused everyone to pull in tight and start enforcing stricter regulations. The guy who changed the color of a Sunset behind a fire shot, was reprimanded, and all he did was a little toning. Anyone who searches will find the Bush advertisement where the solders are so poorly cloned that the same ones repeat about six times, in the crowd. I mean, people here have more talent at making a fake than the added missile tracks and really poor cloning of the clouds in the Reuters photo of Baghdad.

I swear that news crews were setting up people on rooftops in New Orleans, with art supplies, so they could make signs. Look at some of those. Hey, we're trapped on this crummy building, but we have big markers and poster board, to make these great "Send Help" signs for the choppers?

Believe me I'm as skeptical of the news and reporting as anyone. I watch PBS even though I know it's horribly biased and designed to program minds with a bunch of biased pseudo-science. They have good shows, better than the pablum on regular TV.

The idea isn't that news is innocent or that I'm so gullible that I believe everything, it's that we need to be healthy in the observation and skepticism, not toxic and believing every negative conspiracy that comes around the corner. I bet there are some people her who believe the planes crashing into the World Trade Center was not a terrorist attack. Talk about wake up call? Those are the same type of people who claim the media is lying and somehow news is fabricated to control us.

So consider the source. Look at various opinions and options and then decide. Party line or politics is the worst reason for supporting a cause or belief, yet people do that wihtout questioning. We all need to think for ourselves, in which case, the yellow journalism is defeated. It's not like it was in the days of print media when news agencies could control and manipulate the truth. The electronic age means much more for openness and truth, just like it allows anyone with no credentials and no credibility to have their own website.

That old double edged sword. But you can't hide the truth much anymore. The public has a free stream of communications, cameras, twitter, blogs, phones, texting and video in their pockets, and the ability to distribute it, in seconds! Keeping the truth away from us is nearly impossible in these times.

I wouldn't call cropping manipulation, even if it can change people's perception of the image.
Every single photograph is "cropped", whether in camera or in postproduction, there is always stuff outside the image borders that is left out and could possibly change the perception of the image.

Would the "knife" images in the link be more acceptable if the photographer had "cropped" them in the shooting stage?

"Honestreporting" is as mendacious a website as you'll find. Basically, it's an Israeli propaganda site posing as something else.

Excellent post. That's something like I was trying to say, but a lot more elegantly put.
You can't present a story without making decisions about what to show and what to omit. By what gets photographed and what doesn't.
Mix in only even being there to make decisions about some of the events and what you get is one story rather than any sort of objective reality.

I'm not talking about individual instances, I'm talking about the consistent selective use of information to paint a picture which is a distortion of reality. The function of "honestreporting.com" is create the impression that all reports that present Israel in a bad light are nothing more than evidence of persistent malicious bias throughout the media. It does that by highlighting a scattering of instances where major media organisations have been deceived by correspondents into publishing manipulated information and then pretends that this is the normal behaviour of those organisations, therefore everything they say must be rejected as untrue.

The lousy cloning job was done on pictures of Beirut, not Baghdad, if my memory serves me, by the same guy who had the mobile "corpse" posing around town, when the "corpse" wasn't doing his other job as a Hezbollah guide to bomb sites. There was also a dodgy weeping woman who popped up too often. That photographer did a lot of damage to the agencies, but he was just one guy.

Something "honestreporting" won't tell you is that all major media are subjected to attempts to plant propaganda. Look at the pulling down of Saddam's statue in Ferdous square, where the US arranged to have Ahmed Chalabi's entourage turn up as a supposed spontaneous mob to be filmed celebrating Saddam's fall (no mention of that on "honestreporting" because it doesn't fit the bias).

So if you want all your information to be filtered and twisted by Mossad (if they aren't behind that site, they're not doing their job), read (dis)honestreporting.com. If you want to get as close as you can to the truth, read a variety of mainstream media while being aware of how their efforts may be manipulated or twisted by interested parties.

Just to make things clear, I wasn't referring to the article from where I got the photo - I haven't even read it - but to the photo itself.

About the optical illusion, I believe it refers to the gun, that seems like it is pointing to the enemy soldier's head, but actually it is (I think) closer to the camera and perhaps pointing to his chest.

As for "you can't hide the truth much anymore", we can double check news in the internet, that's a fact, but I think this is something the average person doesn't do. A fellow photographer (not from MSG) stopped talking to me because I showed him that, contrary to his belief, the non-USA world was not convinced about the WMD in Iraq, and I proved that with news from non-USA online newspapers from that time. He could have checked that information if he wanted to, but he was led to believe this was true and that was it.

Very interesting that Vietnam story. I guess in either case the images alone don't tell a story, but they can strengthen any version of it. It is a "proof" of what the text says.

Cropping is obvious, but what about those millions of potential photos that aren't shot at all. I can go out this morning and shoot happy people in a full church or just the dementing lady in front (with the church in the bokeh) that is turning around in the dust since months. What to shoot will ultimately depend on my estimation of saleability and impact. Yet both realities are true.

I agree. Wherever you have a polarised political situation rival websites spring up propagandasing for one side or the other. They link to each other, quote each other as authorities and ignore evidence that they don't like. People tend to pick one side and stick to it. It's very difficult for anyone to accept that beliefs which form the framework of their understanding of the world could be wrong, so they react defensively instead of being open to new information.

The Spiegel photos are interesting because they convey very little information. The famous "knife cropping" scandal is only scandalous if you approach the picture with preconceived ideas. We don't know where it came from, was it on board before the commandos arrived or was it taken from the injured soldier? We don't know what it was for or if it had been used for anything, there didn't seem to be any sign of blood on the blade. We don't know why it was cropped or if the person who cropped it even noticed it was there.

It's only when you approach the image with a set of preconceived ideas that the existence and disappearance of the knife becomes proof A)  that the boat was full of knife-weilding thugs and B) there's a conspiracy by Reuters to hide the truth.

My own preconceived notion is that there was so much fuss about this because Israel wanted to shift the focus away from the central issue concerning the legality of its actions.

And when you come down to it, does the faking of missile trails or or planting of actors to play dead in ruins really alter the truth if missiles were fired and people were killed in rocket attacks? Honestreporting's intention seems to be to imply that because there was photoshopping of the scene, then nobody should believe anything reported in the news about Israel's military operations.  In fact, the tarting up of the pictures with PS and an actor or two made no difference at all to the overall story. The photos were merely incidental, they didn't represent vital evidence in support of a written account.

Already done as a film.
The Believer - 2001
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0247199/