(Credit: Sunday Times, screenshot)

The News Corp.-owned Sunday Times used an old, doctored photo with its July 1 story “Iran Issues Stark Threat to Israel,” Honest Reporting wrote. Honest Reporting serves as a media watchdog for reporting on “the Arab-Israeli conflict” and identifies itself as independent from “any government or political party or movement.”

The photo had been identified as doctored in 2008 when it was published with photos of “missile test-firings” in Iran and Agence France-Presse retracted the picture, The New York Times wrote at the time.

The photo of four missiles was faked by duplicating missiles, and was busted as phony when compared with a “nearly identical photo from the same source” run by the Associated Press, according to The New York Times.  As The New York Times wrote, before being retracted, the photo was published on many international news sites and newspaper front pages, including its own website.

Honest Reporting questioned why “The Sunday Times reprinted it in 2012″ given the 2008 reveal it is “a piece of fauxtography meant to bolster Iranian propaganda” and called for readers to contact the Times about the error.

A July 8 search of The Sunday Times‘ website still shows the fake small image pictured with its July 1 story.   We have written to The Sunday Times seeking comment about this error and will update with any response.

We wrote in 2009 a fake photo was circulated to make a rally for the country’s President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad look bigger than it was. Also in 2009, we wrote when the BBC corrected a photo error that wrongly identified a rally photo as pro-Ahmadinejad when it was really for his opponent, Mir Hossein Moussavi.

Last December, The Washington Post corrected a photo gallery’s headline and sub-headline that wrongly claimed Iran wanted nuclear weapons, when the photo gallery was about “Iran’s quest to possess nuclear technology…that could lead to a nuclear weapon.”