Category Archives: Hall of Shame

The real stinkers

There goes another $50,000

Who wrote this claptrap?

Sometimes you have to think that anyone can make a living in the great country that is the USA. After all, Kodak just paid some fool in advertising to blow $50,000 of their rapidly disappearing shareholder’s equity to run this monumental piece of garbage in today’s Wall Street Journal:

Let’s pause to analyze what is wrong:

  • The audience demographic is completely wrong
  • There’s not a product in sight
  • There is no message
  • When you read that “The emotional truth of pictures is under attack”, you quickly conclude that the best use for this page is as a barf bag

You can only agree with the second paragraph. As have the markets:

But worst of all, Kodak, what on earth was wrong with that brilliant little ditty you paid copywriters for a hundred years ago? It goes something like this:

“You take the pictures. We do the rest”

Simple. Magic. Still works well. Saves ink and shareholders’ money, too. Shame on you, Kodak.

Leica’s Watergate

Just another case of a lack of journalistic integrity?.

When I trashed the Panasonic L1 I wrote positively about Michael Reichmann’s objectivity when he wrote about this camera on his web site.

I now have no reason to any longer think that Reichmann is an objective writer.

He has admitted (after clicking the link go to the bottom) that, in ‘reviewing’ the Leica M8 he pulled critical comments from his piece as requested by the Leica Company who had loaned him the camera. It is possible that many who based their purchase decision on his purportedly objective review would have refrained from buying the camera had these comments not been censored.

While he has since bought an M8, I assume using his own money, the reality is he allowed his objectivity to be irrevocably compromised, in this writer’s eyes, by the provision of a free loaner, trading it for self aggrandisement that comes from being one of the favored few to be graced with a pre-production M8. “Look how important I am. Leica gave me a free loaner.” Psychic payola, and good value, had it worked for Leica. They didn’t even have to write a check. In the event, collusion between manufacturer and ‘reviewer’ has, in this case, hurt both.

Had Mr. Recihmann published his adverse findings, explaining that Leica told him they had fixed the problem (they have not) that would have been quite different. In that case he could have stated that he would verify such claims in a follow-up to his review.

As long time readers of this journal know, there is no earthly chance that Yours Truly would ever be given anything free by any manufacturer to ‘review’, as a manufacturer’s publicity machine is not intended to spread truth, justice and the American Way. Rather, its sole intent, which is fine with me, is to sell products. Just don’t expect me to write manufacturer-censored reviews under the guise of objectivity.

You may check my ethics policy by clicking ‘Author and ethics’, below.

The closing three sentences of Reichmann’s apologia are breathtaking and I quote – my underscore. I quote, in case they should one day disappear from his site – please read his whole piece to put these in perspective by clicking on the link in the third paragraph above:

“But, in the end I would do what I did again, simply because I felt that potential owners needed to know what I had learned in my testing, without delay. And, I would have held back again on the issues that I was requested to because that’s the proper way to deal with manufacturers, who one assumes will take their responsibilities to journalists seriously. Enough said.”

If you can reconcile the first and second sentences, please educate me by leaving a comment, below.

So now that you understand Mr. Reichmann’s “….proper way of dealing with manufacturers….” you will know better than to believe anything he ever writes again on his Luminous Landscape web site.

Mr. Reichmann, let me put you out of your naïveté. A manufacturer’s goal in a capitalist system is to get journalists to write what is best for the profitability of the manufacturer. A journalist’s goal is to write unconflicted truth as he sees it, pulling no punches with regard to material facts.

And here is what you really meant to write, and do feel free to copy and paste it into your column – no attribution needed:

“Dear Luminous Landscape readers – I made a serious ethical and journalistic error in withholding information regarding product defects in the new Leica M8. I did this at the request of the Leica Company who had given me a free loan of the camera. In doing so, I made a material misrepresentation to you, my readers. I have seriously compromised my journalistic integrity and accept full responsibility to all of you who bought the camera on my recommendation and now find that, had my findings been uncensored, they would have changed your purchase decision.”

Trust, once lost, Mr. Reichmann, is seldom regained. Print a proper retraction on the lines of the above and I will be happy to publish it here.

As for Leica, the company may have knowingly released a faulty product. If that is the case, the class action lawyers will take care of them, assuming there’s enough money left there to make the suit worthwhile. Why, even Mr. Reichmann would collect something in the settlement.

Political photography

Anti-American photojournalist’s writings exposed.

In yesterday’s Wall Street Journal, art critic Richard B. Woodward writes about how famous Magnum photographer Thomas Hoepker fabricated a story to suit his anti-American mind set. No surprise that German Hoepker proudly boasts of making his home on Manhattan’s upper east side.

The picture in question shows five people in Brooklyn chatting on the waterfront on September 11, 2001, while smoke billows from the World Trade Centers behind them.

Specifically, and scandalously, Hoepker wrote:

“It’s possible they lost people and cared, but they were not stirred by it.”

And here’s more of his tripe:

“Four and a half years later, when I was going through my archive to assemble a retrospective exhibition of my work from more than 50 years, the color slide from Brooklyn suddenly seemed to jump at me. Now, distanced from the actual event, the picture seemed strange and surreal. It asked questions but provided no answers. How could disaster descend on such a beautiful day? How could this group of cool-looking young people sit there so relaxed and seemingly untouched by the mother of all catastrophes which unfolded in the background? Was this the callousness of a generation, which had seen too much CNN and too many horror movies?”

Needless to add, Hoepker’s fraud was aided, abetted and amplifed by none other than, yes, you guessed it, The New York Times, whose Frank Rich called the image “shocking”. You can imagine how much research went into that opinion. Any publication with ethics policies would fire Rich for his drivel; I imagine a promotion is probably in store for him for getting circulation and anti-American feelings up.

Hoepker’s fraud was exposed when none other than one of the people portrayed in the picture wrote to Slate magazine stating:

“Had Hoepker walked fifty feet over to introduce himself he would have discovered a bunch of New Yorkers in the middle of an animated discussion about what had just happened.”

Subsequently, the woman in the picture – a professional photographer, no less – also contacted Slate with a poignant and moving rebuttal.

The Wall Street Journal writes succinctly that “In effect, (Hoepker) has Photoshopped (the image) in his mind so that it now belongs neatly in a more contemporary storyline of this nation’s culpability for world unease”.

Well written.

While I disagree with Woodward’s earlier statement that digital trickery has “…not eroded the truth value of photographs…” – I have shown many examples of Photoshop fraud in this journal which should make everyone sceptical – it is heartening to see people taking a stand against America’s detractors, not least against those who would, in the same breath, proffer inane apologia for all that was good and great about all those moral German industrialists during WWII. You can substitute ‘German industrialists’ with ‘terrorists’ and ‘mass murderers’, and it works just as well.

Update 9/102014: Hoepker’s cynical exploitation of tragedy for personal gain, his self-serving response notwithstanding, is further addressed here.

Update July 12, 2024:

Mercifully Hoepker has finally done the decent thing and passed on to his German heaven. A first for him, doubtless.



A bad man passes.

His crass profit making from one of America’s greatest tragedies confirms that no German should ever lecture Americans on what doing the right thing means. Good riddance.

More lies from CBS

Protect your property by all means, but lie about it?

Hot on the heels of my piece on digital tampering by the news media comes the not-so startling revelation that the people at CBS are at it again.

This time, the purpose of their lies is innocent if no less damnable, namely protecting the image of their $15mm a year teleprompter reader, one Katie Couric.

A picture being worth a thousand words or 15 lbs of fat, I will let the following photograph do my talking for me. Guess which one CBS used in promoting Ms. Couric?

In the same way that they tried suing gun makers for murders committed with their weapons, doubtless that scum bag class known as tort lawyers will be suing Adobe/Photoshop any day now for making it possible to trim off all that fat. The unspeakable in pursuit of the uneatable, as Wilde once said of fox hunting.

Be skeptical

It’s the only way to be sure.

Long time readers will know of my extreme scepticism when it comes to the press, be it photography related or general news. Now Reuters has ‘fessed up that one of its photographers in Lebanon was doctoring pictures to make palls of smoke over Beirut larger. As the examples below show it is Photoshop stamp-and-clone work of the crudest possible kind.

Subsequent investigation by Reuters disclosed that this photographer had done this before, Photoshopping Israeli jets firing flares to look as if they were firing multiple rockets.

Photoshop has its uses in the artistic photography world – I do not hesitate to use it to clean things up – but has no place in objective news reporting. Ansel Adams would never pass for a press photographer, most of his images having been heavily doctored in the darkroom. Nothing wrong with that. Doctoring has its place, just not in news photography.

When I was a boy one tended to trust two or three news sources – the BBC, Time and CBS. No more. The BBC has acquired the default left wing bias of most news services, Time famously demonized the police mug shot of O. J. Simpson on its cover before the case even came to trial (another Photoshop session, albeit more skilful than the Reuters one) and CBS, well, everyone knows about Dan Rather.

So when you next see a picture or a purportedly ‘independent’ review of a piece of photo gear, play it safe. Assume everything you read is doctored and take it from there. That way your chances of being misled are lower. And when it comes to Wall Street, redouble your scepticism.

Reuters fired the photographer, by the way. Had he worked for the New York Times he would even now be proclaiming his First Amendment rights.