This is a tale of two war photographs, but it is also about truth and the moral of a great old movie.

"Suppose you picked up this morning's newspaper and your life was a front-page headline. And everything they said was accurate. But none of it was true," goes the teaser for the 1981 film "Absence of Malice," where Sally Field's dubious reporter character faces off against a press-wary Paul Newman.

More about that later.

Look now at the photograph on the left, which appeared on page A12  (AP / Enric Marti) of Monday's Sacramento Bee and in countless other newspapers around the globe that subscribe to the Associated Press. This picture, according to the cutline, was an "unexploded ordnance" in the village of Karam, taken by an AP photographer as Taliban officials escorted foreign journalists around the site.

The photo at left, which appeared Monday in The Bee, was taken at the same time as the photo below, on Sunday while the photographer was under Taliban escort. The difference, the Associated Press now says, was the wide-angle lens used to take the picture.

That, you might be thinking, is a mighty big bomb lying around civilians. That, thought Bee photo editor Tahra Makinson-Sanders, who worked Sunday night and took the transmission, is a "holy s---" picture. Big bomb, little man nearby. Wow.

Astute readers didn't buy it.

In this former military town with more than its share of military experts, editors began to get challenging phone calls and e-mail.

Too big for a bomb; has to be a fuel tank, insisted one.

Definitely doctored, concluded another.

Makinson-Sanders -- who, like most photojournalists, wouldn't consider altering a news photograph -- began nosing around. The mere suggestion in a newsroom that a news photograph, especially a war photograph, might have been manipulated or altered is like mentioning to a doctor she may have killed her patient.

It gets your attention.

Look now at the picture on the right. After receiving inquiries, AP acknowledged Monday that this is the same bomb shot by the same photographer on the same day -- but with a different camera lens.

Presto! A new reality.

As Makinson-Sanders eventually was told, AP photographer Enric Marti had taken the "big-bomb photo" with a 20 mm wide-angle lens, adding drama to the visual but distorting the scale. This kind of wide-angle distortion generally is evident to the trained eye in straight lines that suddenly curve, or in blurriness around the edges. But as The Bee's photo editor noted, this image had already been cropped from the sides -- a detail she considered unimportant on Sunday night, but now realizes may help explain the missing clues.

A day after the transmission, AP re-sent the photographs and put this caption addition on the photo in question: "That object is the same as that pictured in (the other photo). ... Increased size is due to wide angle lens used."

But in The Bee and most other daily newspapers, the image of the U.S. government's bomb-drop near Afghan civilians had already been selected and published.

For better or for worse.

"This goes to the very heart of our credibility," said Deputy Managing Editor Mort Saltzman, who oversees the editing of news sections. "It's very important to me as a journalist that our coverage be as objective and fair as possible.

"When something like this happens, it adds to the point of view that the newspaper is going out of its way to paint a bad picture of the (U.S.) government."

At the Poynter Institute in St. Petersburg, Fla., a respected journalism center that examines ethical issues, Kenny Irby is also troubled. A photojournalist who heads up the institute's visual journalism, Irby understands a creative photographer's urge to "capture a dramatic image from a mundane situation." Without talking to the photographer, he cannot be sure what was going on in his head. "But it is a very deceptive image," Irby said.

Jack Stokes, an AP spokesman in New York, said that once inquiries began coming in, the wire service followed standard procedure by tracking the journalistic decisions from the field photographer all the way through the editing process.

The news service believes it acted properly by issuing a revised caption and does not think the photo needed to be stricken from the files, as occasionally happens, he said. With hindsight, though, he acknowledges an explanation earlier about the discrepancy in scale might have helped.

As for agendas?

"I can't make this clearer: When we make errors, they are journalistic errors. There is nothing else involved," he said.
Still, several Bee photographers and editors who viewed the so-called wide-angle photo don't quite buy the distortion explanation and believe the object is, as readers speculated, an ejected aircraft fuel tank.

Their trust is shaken.

It's repeatedly been said that truth is the first casualty of war. If the AP is right, and this was the product of a wide-angle lens, one could argue that the photograph was not altered or doctored at all. In a purely technical sense, nothing was added, nothing subtracted. It was the actual "unexploded ordnance," and the bystander really was there.

In this scenario, the photo is accurate. But it isn't true. And it isn't acceptable.

Because this isn't Hollywood.