A Bridge Too Weird

Power Line has some questions about these pictures taken by Hezbollah propaganda photographer Adnan Hajj:











As part of their analysis, they have the captions that ran with the last photo:

"A Lebanese citizen gestures near the ruined Qasmiya Bridge near Tyre in south Lebanon shortly after being bombed by Israeli warplanes July 12, 2006."

And they conclude:

This is quite obviously a different bridge on a different road with different damage. Which one is the real Qasmiya Bridge? Beats me. All I know is, these pictures, when considered together, make no sense. Reuters employs photo editors, I believe. Didn't they notice that they had put out pictures of two evidently different bridges, identifying them as the same location? Didn't they notice that the overturned car turned up in different locations? Apparently not.

Reuters sends these photos out to newspapers all over the world, with captions that are supplied, I take it, by the photographer. And newspapers take both photos and captions as gospel. Here, for example, Australia's The Age reproduces the photo of the overturned car, in its second location, with the caption: "Israeli warplanes leave rubble and a wrecked car after an air strike on Qasmiya Bridge, near the southern Lebanese city of Tyre, as Israel responds to a deadly Hezbollah raid." Well, maybe. But how, exactly, do we know that the car didn't come from a local junkyard? When a photographer and his subjects (or cast of players, as I suspect is the case here) start cheating, who knows where the cheating ends?

Perhaps this guy is just trying for a Pulitzer Prize?