On March 30, 2003 Walski was on assignment for the
Los Angeles Times, covering the
2003 Invasion of Iraq near
Basra. He took a series of photographs that day of British soldiers telling Iraqi civilians to take cover. When he later viewed them, he decided to use his computer to combine two of the images that had been taken a few seconds apart into a single image with better overall composition. He then sent the pictures to
Los Angeles Times staff who posted them on the internal photo sharing system for various media outlets owned by the
Tribune News Corporation. On March 31, media across the country ran the image, including the
Los Angeles Times on the front page, the
Hartford Courant, owned by the Tribune Corporation, and the
Chicago Tribune, which printed it on a
jump page. It was at the
Courant, on whose front page the image was published six columns wide, that inconsistencies in the image were noticed. The
Courant's assistant managing editor Thom McGuire confirmed that the image was altered, and then contacted Colin Crawford,
Los Angeles Times Director of Photography. It took Crawford several days to get hold of Walski who was still in battle conditions covering the war. When confronted with the image Crawford said, "Give me an excuse. Tell me it was a satellite transmission problem. Say something." to which Walski replied, "No, I did it. I combined the two pictures." As a result of manipulating the photograph, Walski was fired from the
Los Angeles Times via satellite phone on April 1, 2003. The
Los Angeles Times ran an immediate retraction, and on April 2 it ran a front-page article explaining Walski's faked image, illustrated by the two source images and the manipulated image. The
Hartford Courant and the
Chicago Tribune also ran retractions. ==Since the Iraq War==