I pulled out my old college photojournalism book the other day in the wake of the staging of photos coming out of the Israeli-Hezbollah war in Southern Lebanon. The book, "Photojournalism: The Professional's Approach" (I've got the 2nd Edition) by Kenneth Kobre is obviously something that Reuters photographers need to read.

The staging of news photographs -- I'm not talking about those crummy photos that appear on society pages -- has been unacceptable in journalism for decades. When the talk began of staging photographs, I remembered one photo in particular, a photo of three fans sitting in the stands of a college baseball games with their bare feet propped up. The fan in the middle has "Yeah" written on one foot and "Eckerd" on the other, Eckerd being one of the competing baseball teams. The photo got photographer Norman Zeisloft fired. Why? Because he'd suggested a fan write that on his feet -- and even tried to do the writing himself (he failed on his own because the fan's feet were too dirty and his pen couldn't write on them).

However, what's happening in Lebanon is much worse, and the media is not doing nearly enough to police it. Los Angeles Times media writer Tim Rutten had an excellent article -- apart from the gratuitous potshots at conservative bloggers -- on the issue in Saturday's paper.

Many, including grisly images from the Qana tragedy, clearly are posed for maximum dramatic effect. There is an entire series of photos of children's stuffed toys poised atop mounds of rubble. All are miraculously pristinely clean and apparently untouched by the devastation they purportedly survived. (Reuters might want to check its freelancers' expenses for unexplained Toys R Us purchases.) In some cases, the bloggers seem to have uncovered the same photographer using more than one identity. There's an improbable photo by Hajj of a Koran burning atop the rubble of a building supposedly destroyed by an Israeli aircraft hours before. Nothing else in sight is alight. (With photos, as in life, when something seems too perfect to be true, it's almost always because it is.) In other photos, the same wrecked building is portrayed multiple times with the same older woman — one supposes she ought to be called a model — either lamenting its destruction or passing by in different costumes.

There's more, and it's worth your time to take a look. That's one of the undeniable strengths of the Internet and of the blogosphere, and the fact that it is being employed to help keep journalism honest ultimately is to everybody's benefit.

What the major news organizations ought to be doing is to make their own analysis of the images coming out of Lebanon and if, as seems more than likely, they find widespread malfeasance, some hard questions need to be asked about why it occurred. Some of it may stem from the urge every photographer feels to make a photo perfect. Some of it probably flows from a simple economic imperative — a freelancer who produces dramatic images gets picked up more and paid more. Moreover, the obscenely anti-Israeli tenor of most of the European and world press means there's an eager market for pictures of dead Lebanese babies.

Kudos to Rutten for acknowledging the obvious and encouraging the media outlets that are buying these photos to behave responsibly. Of course, they shouldn't have needed his encouragement in the first place.

*UPDATE* Dave Kopel's article is necessary reading too.