In this, the week of handing out $10,000 Pulitzers, why not take down one of these ego-driven award winners? For starters, there's photographer Zhang Liang from the Chinese newspaper Harbin Daily, who just lost his job for, what else, doctoring a photo. This photo! In 2005, Liang won the gold award in the China International Press Photo Contest, but now it turns out the pic – "Over 800 pigeons at a square take the bird flu vaccine" – features two pigeons that weren't actually present when it was shot. And that's not the end of the fabrications.

Meanwhile, a Chinese newspaper has apologized to readers following the discovery that an award-winning photograph of a herd of Tibetan antelope frolicking under the Qinghai-Tibet railway as a high-speed train sped overhead is also a fake. The antelope had been digitally pasted from another photograph.

Only a week ago, the apparent fabrication of film of an endangered South China tiger in the central province of Hunan was also seriously dealt with. The cameraman was fired and lost his press card, while two officials who helped in the scam lost their posts.

Last October, villager Zhou Zhenglong from the northwestern Shaanxi Province produced 30 pictures of what he claimed was a wild South China tiger, an endangered species that hasn't been seen in the wild since the 1980s.

The Shaanxi Forestry Department eventually apologized for failing to exercise prudence in announcing the pictures to be real, but the photos' authenticity has not been officially disproved.