Keeping it unreal: once you accept that Israel's a mistake and George Bush a fanatic in thrall to big oil, doctoring news photos only seems natural.

DAVID FRUM, THE CONSERVATIVELY INCLINED COLUMNIST, has performed a service for humanity by cataloguing some of the lies, deceptions and photographic forgeries appearing in the western major-media coverage of the Lebanon conflict. His evidence is beyond dispute. Blatant falsehoods appeared in the television reporting of Reuters, the Associated Press, The New York Times and Time magazine.

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Frum cited examples, such as stories about Hezbollah handing out US$100 bills to people who had lost their homes to Israeli rocket fire, with accompanying photos of the "cash." When enlarged by bloggers, the bills were exposed as fakes that lacked the uncopyable anti-counterfeiting strip. Then there was the horror story of the deliberate bombing and the destruction of an ambulance. This also turned out to be phony, and so presumably were the wounds of its much-bandaged driver, who appeared unbandaged in another "news" photo a few days later.

One blog I saw showed an old woman devastated because her home had just been demolished. A week later this identical woman was depicted mourning a different dwelling. The same boy appeared wounded in one photo, unwounded in another and as a corpse in a third--clearly identifiable in all three. Horrifyingly heavy smoke from bombed houses turned out to be a burning garbage dump with extra smoke brushed in for effect.

Reuters eventually conceded that much of its artistic photography was ersatz and fired one of their photographers. This apparently was supposed to fix everything, just as The New York Times fixed everything when it was disclosed that their Moscow correspondents through most of the thirties had been on the payroll of the Soviet secret police. The Times fixed everything by apologizing for it 60 years later.

The most alarming aspect, then and now, is the strong evidence that many of the journalists involved were actively engaged in the fraud. They weren't being gullible; they were deliberately lying. Why? Was it fear for their own safety if they told the truth? After all, terrorists kidnapped two journalists from Fox News for providing the wrong kind of coverage--wrong, that is, from the terrorists' point of view.

But I suspect the journalists' motives for this deception are much deeper than mere cowardice. I think they are rooted in the assumptions they brought to the story when they began covering it, assumptions of which they are themselves barely conscious. They acquired these assumptions in high school. Their university experience reinforced them, and when they began their journalistic careers, they discovered that the most informed, the most respected, the most widely acknowledged people in their profession all thought the same way.

It is not so much a creed as it is a kind of code, which you pick up as you make your way through the profession, and which can to a degree be enunciated. For example, all truth is relative. Pretensions to know anything as morally right are bigotry and lead to "judgmentalism." Religion must be regarded as a "personal thing" and denied any role in the formation of public policy. The highest value known to humanity is the self, and the service of the self is the ultimate modus of the successful life. Such were the generalities of the code, and promotion in the profession assumed the acceptance of them.

In specific circumstances, however, the code becomes much more specific. In the Middle East, for instance, Israel is the real aggressor, and the whole idea of there being an Israel at all is probably a huge mistake. George W. Bush is a born-again Christian fanatic, at best a fool, at worst a tool of the oil industry, or both. His election in 2000, and his re-election in 2004, constitutes an appalling disaster. America under the leadership of people like him brought on the terrorist offensive, and also caused the Lebanon war.

Given this mindset among most journalists covering the conflict, is it really any wonder that the odd picture is touched up, the occasional tragedy faked, the discordant fact here and there ignored or deliberately suppressed? Their responsibility is to present the real story--never examining too closely what they mean by "real."