The contrarian this time is On the Media host Bob Garfield, writing for The Guardian. He satirizes Patrick as “the Great Satan” and says “let him suffer the fate of the frog!” He then raises that pesky question: “Don’t all journalists alter reality?” Finally, he asks this rhetorical humdinger: “[d]id he [Patrick] misrepresent the story, or did he perhaps just make it clearer?”

Today readers of The Bee learned that editors investigating Patrick’s archives found two additional images that had been digitally altered, also a violation of The Bee’s ethics standards

The Sacramento Bee fired longtime photographer Bryan Patrick on Friday for violating the paper’s ethics policy forbidding manipulation of documentary photographs.

When published on the Bee’s front page on Sunday as part of a two-picture combo, the images carried a byline for longtime Bee staff photographer Bryan Patrick.

The Sacramento Bee published a photograph taken during the Galt Winter Bird Festival of a snowy egret grabbing for a frog just caught by a great egret. This week we learned the photograph had been digitally altered by the photographer in violation of our standards

The core determinant, for me, is whether objects were moved, people’s faces were changed, images were combined in a way that altered what anyone would have seen in the setting, or if things were removed from the frame

perhaps it was because the scene was so nearly impeccable that someone — an overzealous North Korean photo editor? — appears to have taken issue with an errant group of men, barely noticeable in a sweeping photograph of the procession in central Pyongyang, and removed them

Photographers are facing enormous ethical questions posed by the allegations aired during the ongoing Leveson inquiry. Here, Max Houghton, course leader in MA Photojournalism at the University of Westminster and a writer on photography offers her personal views on the challenges ahead.

Wired.com

A new photograph-analyzing tool quantifies changes made by digital airbrushers in the fashion and lifestyle industry, where image alteration has become the psychologically destructive norm.

Retweets, like tweets, should not be written in a way that looks like you’re expressing a personal opinion on the issues of the day. A retweet with no comment of your own can easily be seen as a sign of approval of what you’re relaying

In journalism justifications like that pop up frequently to argue why something considered unethical should be seen as okay “under the circumstances.” You’ve heard them: “magazines are different from newspapers” or “the cover is an advertisement” to explain away a breach of journalism ethics. Our ethics should determine our actions, of course. But there seems to be an unending stream of ways journalists justify letting their actions determine their ethics.

Magnum Photos’ vice president Christopher Anderson has adressed the controversy arising from the distribution of Libyan Secret Service photographs via the agency’s website, BJP can report

Over the last 48 hours I have received nearly a dozen requests to voice an opinion on an alleged fake photo. The photo, by Reuters photographer Anis Mili, is described as “A rebel on crutches fires a rocket propelled grenade while fighting on the front line in Sirte September 24, 2011″. The photo, taken from right behind the RPG as it is launched, is truly amazing.

Seems that the Gagosian Gallery of Cariou v. Prince fame can’t stay away from artists using photography to make their art. This time it’s Bob Dylan who takes photographs, repaints them and then claims they are “firsthand depictions of people, street scenes, architecture and landscape.”

Unlike the cables that WikiLeaks has been publishing piecemeal since last fall, these cables are raw and unredacted, and contain the names of informants and suspected intelligence agents that were blacked out of the official releases. Der Freitag said the documents include the names of suspected agents in Israel, Jordan, Iran and Afghanistan, and noted that interested parties – such as the Iranian government or intelligence agencies – could have already discovered and decrypted the file to uncover the names of informants.

How do you remain an ethical photographer when everyone’s relentlessly Twitpic-ing, Facebooking and sharing pics taken from their 5 megapixel cameraphones with the latest Apps installed to give artifical effects and ambience to their images?

Photographer Jason Lee Parry has earned international attention this week as a defendant in a high-profile, $28 million lawsuit. A 16-year old model Parry photographed in sexy poses when she was just 15 is suing him for licensing the images without a model release

via Rob Galbraith

American Suburb X:

The principal issue raised by the remarkable photographs of Diane Arbus seems not to be their remarkableness, which few would dispute, but their morality. The very potency of her images, their dangerous, disturbing allure, demands an almost instantaneous moral judgement on the part of the viewer. Her pictures call forth an immediate stance which, it would seem, just cannot remain equivocal, yet which in many cases is tinged with uneasy contradiction. To some, Arbus is seen as the prime exemplar of the fundamental baseness of the photographic act, that act which caters ineffably to the disinterested voyeur lurking in us all. Others laud her for her compassion and her humanity, finding in her work an empathy with a disadvantaged subject matter to rival that of Riis, or Hine, or any of the great photographic humanists.

North Korea claimed that seven North Koreans are walking in a flooded street in this July 15 photo North Korea’s Korean Central News Agency took, which it provided to AP. In the photo, residents walk in knee-deep water, but photo experts suspect the photo of being retouched, citing the relatively dry clothes of the residents as evidence. [YONHAP]