One can make too much of stories like this one, so allow me.
I’m often told that MSM is only human. MSM makes mistakes sometimes, but it corrects them straightaway and thereby preserves its well-deserved reputation as a truth telling operation.
This incident puts the lie to all that. Given the multiple layers of fakery in the instant tweet, one can legitimately say that Reuters is in the business of paint(ball)ing reality.
Tidewater News and Opinion Forum 
Well, thanks for demonstrating how a trivial editorial mistake with ZERO bearing on the story reported bounces around inside the right-wing chamber much to the glee of Putinistas such as yourself. I suppose you are saying that this little mistake proves that Russian propaganda is much more reliable that the work of Western governments and professional journalists from highly respected news organizations whose employees will NOT be imprisoned or worse for telling the truth?
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RE: “trivial editorial mistake”
I don’t see the mistake as trivial.
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“I don’t see the mistake as trivial.”
That is because you are a very silly fellow always looking for ways to denigrate real news.
The story itself did not have that picture. The picture was attached to a one sentence tweet containing a link to the story referenced. What difference would it make to the story if the tweet linking to it were illustrated with a picture of the border guards holding guns instead of holding training weapons?
Answer: None.
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You mean, What difference does false advertising make to the product being promoted?
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You tell us. You spread the “false advertising” all of the time. Kind of makes YOU the local expert on it.
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You tell me what “false advertising” I have spread.
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We an start with the majority of your posts about Ukraine, move to the Big Lie and then some drivel about economics.
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Deflection from the WRT post?
Me thinks so.
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What it tells me is that the journalists who think themselves fit to shield us from misinformation on every topis under the sun don’t know an assault rifle from a paintball gun.
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“What it tells me . . .”
I don’t think you know what journalists think of themselves. That they think of themselves as “shields” seem extremely unlikely. If anything, they think of themselves as people employed to find good information and to report it.
I also think that someone working under who knows what kind of time and other pressure to cover events in a warzone grabbed the wrong stock photo for a tweet. It may be because that person does not know an assault rifle from a paintball gun OR – and infinitely more likely – they did not look at the photo very closely. A very, very trivial mistake that is bouncing around right-wing media as if it were something important. The fact that this simple error has produced so much interest among you people is far more telling than the trivial mistake itself. IMHO.
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Yeah, media just gets in the way of alternative facts spewed by propagandists you like. You elitism is blaring.
It is common, more now than in the past, for media to use a stock shot to illustrate a story if an immediately available contemporaneous is unavailable. No big deal if the photo is illustrative and not the story itself.
But I don’t know why you are complaining. You wouldn’t believe the story with or without a photo because PJ Media or it’s ilk didn’t write it up.
I think the right is desperate. Putin might lose and there goes a perfectly good despot we could have modeled our own after.
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RE: “What it tells me is that the journalists who think themselves fit to shield us from misinformation on every topics under the sun don’t know an assault rifle from a paintball gun.”
When I was a proposal manager, one of my colleagues got sacked for making a similar photo error. He needed a photo of a submarine in an illustration used to explain a U.S. Navy weapon system. The photo he chose was beautiful, but at Red Team (final proposal review) one of the executives noticed it was a photo of a Russian sub.
Point is, every publication professional has heard a similar story, to the point that most try very hard to avoid becoming the goat.
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So an occasional gaffe occurs. Most MSM sources claim the mistake to correct it. Some of the “media” sources you claim tend to tell a lie and then run with it. It took OAN several years and lawsuits to finally say there was no widespread fraud in the 2020 election. I wouldn’t exactly call that self correction. I call it avoiding a trial.
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