Picture this

Israel’s war on Hizbullah is being fought with rockets and bombs, automatic gunfire, and shards of shrapnel. But it is also a war of images, which implicates news gatherers as potential players who can tip the war’s balance on the battlefields and in the hearts and minds of millions of readers and viewers.

Advocates on all sides see bias in coverage that favors their opponents. In fact, The Washington Post recently reported on a Stanford University study that found the deeper the convictions held by viewers, the more likely they are to perceive bias in coverage of their issues. The current crisis has been a mixed bag for Israel, image-wise, at least in the West. Many all-news stations and broadcast networks have placed their anchors in Israel, for obvious reasons, and the results are stand-ups offering a view of the fighting literally from Israel’s perspective. On the other hand, the quantity, might, and success of Israel’s air strikes on Lebanon, and the inevitable civilian casualties that result, produce the sort of pictures that can and have built a groundswell of international impatience. Israel has tried to make the case that its people, forced into bomb shelters or internal exile, are victims too, but its leaders know that “If it bleeds, it leads,” and theirs is a harder story to tell.

It’s difficult enough to fight this war of images without journalists themselves enlisting as combatants. That was the case of a Beirut-based photographer for Reuters, Adnan Hajj, who doctored — quite blatantly, we might add — a photograph of burning buildings in southern Beirut that made the damage look far more extensive than it was. Reuters canned Hajj, withdrew all his photographs from its database, and pledged to tighten its vetting procedure for images of the Middle East conflict.

Why such safeguards were not in place before Hajj’s deception is unclear. Every news outlet should take its cue from this incident and apply similar scrutiny to the images they disseminate. They need to be on guard for manipulated digital images, photos cropped to heighten the drama or distort reality, and obvious attempts to enlist soldiers and civilians in staged photos or videos. This is all Journalism 101.

Activists on all sides will never be satisfied that their side is being heard. That doesn’t absolve the media from doing a better job on their side.