Ref: The Daily Mirror...22:53 UTC
(From the BBC news website)
Editor sacked over 'hoax' photos
The Mirror board said Morgan would be stepping down immediately
Daily Mirror editor Piers Morgan has been sacked after the newspaper conceded photos of British soldiers abusing an Iraqi were fake....
...The newspaper released a statement saying: "The Daily Mirror published in good faith photographs which it absolutely believed were genuine images of British soldiers abusing an Iraqi prisoner.
"However there is now sufficient evidence to suggest that these pictures are fakes and that the Daily Mirror has been the subject of a calculated and malicious hoax.
"The Daily Mirror therefore apologises unreservedly for publishing the pictures and deeply regrets the reputational damage done to the QLR [the Queen's Lancashire Regiment] and the Army in Iraq.
"The paper will continue to cooperate fully with the investigation. "
.........................................
Yeah! I bet they will...
OK. I'm happy to be accused of being right after the fact, but those pictures, the Daily Mirror's 'Iraq abuse' photos, always struck me as being the most faked photos in the history of photo-journalism. As a journalist and photographer I, for one, feared from day one that those pics were bull****!...their timing was too damn convenient for a start, their focus was so obviously too sharp, the clothes were too clean and the wooden truck floor was too damn obviously not British Army issue, and given the size of the regiment, too easy to trace in any case.
For Christ's sake...!!!
Answer me this one question Piers: Just how many man-hours did you, as an editor, demand be applied to the verification of their authenticity? My estimate is it was 'same-day.'
Does anyone from your legal team care to deny my estimate?
Piers, from one journalist to another... you always were a slimy ****wit. You and the ilk of The Sun, and every other tabloid who has consistently sold their sole at the alter of tomorrow's sales figures, your company's profit, and therefore your own Christmas bonus, now deserve all you get. I only pity all the honest, hardworking journalists who have fought against all the crap, threats and lies management-led todies like yourself and all those other proprietors have wrought upon their futures and that of their families and their mortgages in order to make them do your bidding. Their bonus will undoubtendly be less than your 'Golden Get Lost,' I'm sure.
Call yourself an editor? You don't have the honour, the mettle, or the balls. Your a fcuking disgrace to journalism, and the exact reason people like me have to defend professions like ours all too often on websites such as Pprune...Boll0cks!!!
Rant over...and my apologies to those hereabouts who may be wondering what this is all about.
I hereafter refuse to defend the indefensible.
And in the aftermath of Nick Berg, and the reasons stated for his murder, what can I say
Dan
