Oops - better check on that photo before publishing it

Reuters stepped on their dicks big-time. The joke is that they were found out by a 13-year-old movie buff... From The Guardian:

Reuters gets that sinking feeling
News agency Reuters has been forced to admit that footage it released last week purportedly showing Russian submersibles on the seabed of the North Pole actually came from the movie Titanic.

The images were reproduced around the world - including by the Guardian and Guardian Unlimited - alongside the story of Russia planting its flag below the North Pole on Thursday last week.

But it has now emerged that the footage actually showed two Finnish-made Mir submersibles that were employed on location filming at the scene of the wreck of the RMS Titanic ship in the north Atlantic some 10 years ago.

This footage was used in sequences in James Cameron's 1997 blockbuster about the 1912 disaster.

The mistake was only revealed after a 13-year-old Finnish schoolboy contacted a local newspaper to tell them the images looked identical to those used in the movie.

Reuters lifted the photos from the Russian State television Channel RTR. RTR was using them to illustrate the story; RTR said that this was library footage and was not the actual flag planting. Additionally, the footage was aired when the Russians were still several hours away from the pole. Reuters did come clean and altered the captions to reflect the actual origin of the images. Seems like they have had problems like this in the past:

The incident is doubly embarrassing for the agency since it follows a case in August last year in which it published an image by a freelancer of Israeli bombings in Lebanon that had been dramatised using photo manipulation, with the addition of smoke rising from allegedly burning buildings.

Let me introduce you to two concepts:

Research

Fact-Checking