David Bernstein, writing at the Volokh Conspiracy, makes a high level Associated Press executive look pompous and foolish in her denial of the very possibility of photographs being staged. It is rather stunning that antique media people think they can still say, in essence, "We're above that. We have professional standards. Trust us." and have anyone out there believe them.

Kathleen Carroll, senior Vice President of AP: "I also know from 30 years of experience in this business that you can't get competitive journalists [note that she doesn't limit herself to AP photographers] to participate in the kind of (staging) experience that is being described."

Anderson Cooper of CNN, via The Corner:

While on the Hezbollah side, it's really interesting — I was in Beirut, and they took me on this sort of guided tour of the Hezbollah— controlled territories in southern Lebanon that were heavily bombed. They are much cruder, obviously. They don't have the experience in this kind of thing. But they clearly want the story of civilian casualties out. That is their — what they're heavily pushing, to the point where on this tour I was on, they were just making stuff up. They had six ambulances lined up in a row and said, OK, you know, they brought reporters there, they said you can talk to the ambulance drives. And then one by one, they told the ambulances to turn on their sirens and to zoom off, and people taking that picture would be reporting, I guess, the idea that these ambulances were zooming off to treat civilian casualties, when in fact, these ambulances were literally going back and forth down the street just for people to take pictures of them.

Looks to me like "competitive journalists" were participating in staging.

Ed Lasky   8 10 06