The symmetrical plume of dark smoke rings rising from bombed Beirut just did not look right, and it was not long before bloggers were tipped off that the dramatic Reuters picture featured "cloned" smoke as well as the real thing.
Charles Johnson, a US blogger, broke the story on his Little Green Footballs site. It was another scoop for the man who uncovered the faked memos used in the CBS story about US President George W. Bush's military record, which led to the resignation of legendary anchorman Dan Rather.
This time, there was a sacking. Reuters admitted the picture had been doctored and its editorial guidelines violated, and swiftly dispensed with the services of the photographer, Adnan Hajj, a Lebanese freelancer who had served the news agency for a decade.
The controversy appears to be another case of bloggers setting the mainstream news agenda and shining a light on dodgy journalism.
Are Hajj's two doctored photographs the tip of the iceberg? Sceptical bloggers certainly think so in the case of the Israel-Lebanon conflict.
Doctored or staged pictures are as old as the medium itself.
"This all started with Chairman Mao and `non-people' but you needed a top artist to paint them out. Now with Photoshop, you can get people who can do it who aren't artists. Anyone can do it after half-an-hour's training," says Eamonn McCabe, a former picture editor.
"We've always believed in photographs as truth. Now I don't think the readers do. They have a healthy mistrust of everything they see. I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing," he says.
Right-wing bloggers in Britain and the US want to prove that, as Richard North of the EU Referendum blog argues, the mainstream media are swallowing Hezbollah propaganda, serving up staged pictures of those rescuing the dead and badly injured as the real thing.
At first, they suggested victims of the Israeli bombings were being carried around and posed for pictures because of different time-stamps on photographs reproduced on news Web sites. An Associated Press (AP) photo was time-stamped 7:21am, showing a dead girl in an ambulance. Another AP picture by a different photographer, stamped 10:25am, showed the same girl being loaded on to the ambulance. A third, with the time 10:44am, showed a rescue worker carrying the girl with no ambulance nearby.
Three agencies -- AP, AFP and Reuters -- denied staging pictures at Qana. And the explanation for the different times was simple.
Different Web sites, such as Yahoo, put their own time-stamps on photos they receive from news feeds; and AP does not distribute photos sequentially but on their news value and how quickly they are sent in.
Kathleen Carroll, AP's senior vice president and executive editor, added: "You can't get competitive journalists to participate in the kind of [staging] experience that is being described."
Have amateur bloggers really got the tools to decipher what is right and what is not?
As Shane Richmond, news editor of Telegraph.co.uk, pointed out on his blog, jPeg, compression -- reducing the file size of images so they can be used on the internet -- causes the "smudging" that bloggers alleged was a doctoring of photographs.
North continues to stand by his main argument -- that pictures at Qana were staged -- but admits the inconsistencies over the time-stamps proved to be irrelevant. Another point that Richmond knocked down -- that one Qana helper changed his T-shirt, implying there was no sense of urgency about the rescue bid -- was, North responds, a minor claim.
Hajj may have been exposed but in the case of Qana, bloggers have been proved more wrong than right. That, argues North, is hardly the point.
The difference between newspapers and the Web is that "we put our `working out' up on the blogs," he says.
"It's the classic 18th century scientific technique -- thesis, antithesis, synthesis. Whereas the media have usurped the role of God, handing down tablets of stone as the unvarnished truth and then putting up the ramparts and saying we stand by our story, we are always right," he says.
North also has rejected the criticism of being an "amateur." He is a full-time parliamentary researcher with a doctorate and has also worked for newspapers (currently researching for the Sunday Telegraph) since 1992.
"I'm not one of those who crow that we're replacing the media. We need the media. It's a symbiotic relationship, which will expand the whole communication universe," he says. "You see as much garbage on the blogosphere as you see in the media. Blogs can't replace them but the reason I started blogging is to address the bias [of mainstream media]."
More than one mainstream media journalist feels the debate over Qana is part of a wider campaign by Israeli sympathizers to discredit journalism that shows Lebanese victims. In other words, blogs are now part of an old-fashioned propaganda war.
"People are risking their lives going to take pictures and then being accused of setting up the murder of children," says a war photographer in Lebanon.
One British picture editor admits that a limited amount of "staging" goes on. A favorite, she says, is for a photographer to gather up a pile of children's toys or move a bombed tricycle among the rubble to get a better composition. It is a mild version of father of photojournalism Matthew Brady's body-rearranging in the American Civil War.
Many war photographers take a harder line.
"Setting things up or moving things around [in a photo-editing package after you have taken a picture] is completely unacceptable," the war photographer says.
"The only thing that may be vaguely acceptable is ... [removing] someone's lens hood in the corner of your frame, but that's as far as it goes," the photographer says.
While different media organizations have different standards, there are signs that, as doctoring pictures becomes easier, editors are getting tougher. All photographers I spoke to agreed it was acceptable to darken or lighten pictures or parts of pictures, such as the sky -- following the accepted professional principle that you only do with digital what you could do in a darkroom.
Last month, however, the Charlotte Observer, a small American paper, sacked a photographer for altering the color of an image that he said was to "restore the actual color of the sky."
The color was lost when he underexposed the photo to offset the glare from the sun.
Are mainstream media responding to bloggers holding them to account or are they still reluctant to admit when they have got a point?
"If there has been reluctance then that is certainly starting to change," Richmond says. "Reuters, for example, responded to the Hajj claims with speed and transparency. Likewise, AP and AFP responded quickly to the allegations against their photographers. They didn't give the answer some bloggers wanted to hear so the debate continues, but they certainly took the criticism seriously."
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