What the doctored Reuters photos tell us... about ourselves.

[skids]

So somewhere in the chain of the Reuters graphics process some photos got doctored to make some smoke look more dramatic. RWers are in a tizzy saying this is another sign of the mainstream media's anti-Israel bias. :eyes: LWers suspect a Dan Rather style setup intended to cast FUD on the Qana story.

Nothing can be further from the truth. Are you ready for it? Fair warning -- It'll hurt.

The photos were doctored not by some political agenda, but for one simple reason: sensationalism sells. The corporate media are vying to show us the biggest explosions, the most dramatic twists of plots, the fastest action in this...

...our latest sporting event.

Dutifully the American viewer has pulled up the armchair and broken out the bowl of cheezits, watching intently as half a world away people die on both sides. What do they draw from this? Are they, between beers, forming an educated opinion on the relative merits of the politics of Hezbollah or Isreal? Are they, during commercial-break trips to the can, perhaps, trying to discern the impact that this will have on the world going forward, and how the events here can be learned from to create lasting peace? Nope.

What we as a people are getting out of this is entertainment. And unlike a football game or the Tour de France, we don't have to make excuses for wasting our time glued to the TV and web over it. After all -- this is important stuff. People are dying over there. So if we are a bit distracted don't blame us for not doing the dishes, refinancing the mortgage, or re-registering to vote. Don't point a finger at us for failing to improve ourselves and our country -- we had weighty things on our mind. In such times of crisis, it's only natural that we be a little distracted.

Passive entertainment you don't have to make excuses for. What could be better?

By the way, if the death and violence and environmental and economic devestation just aren't doing it for you, here's a little trick to pimp your war lust: pick a side. Which one? We don't care! Base it on your preconceptions, prejudices, or heck just flip a coin. It doesn't matter. The corporate media will make sure that there is plenty of back-and-forth in this game. No, of course they aren't able to give you a real view of what's going on strategically -- neither side would let reporters near them were they to broadcast sensitive tactical information like that. But what they will provide is an ebb and flow. One side will be said to have brought the other to the ropes, and then in a surprise surge of strength, the underdog will regain the initiative. Over and over and over.

And if you just can't bring yourself to watch the gore, you can always watch the cheerleaders. Yes, fight about which of them are biased and which are not, and the relative merits of their pom-poms. Just whatever you do, remain transfixed. Don't take your eye off the misery over there. You might accidentally notice the misery in your own back yard and the next thing you know, you'll be on your lawn with a rake, sweating profusely, trying to comb the filth from America's own soil.

We wouldn't want that. You might get dehydrated.

So sit back. Enjoy the show. You have to. This is a real groundshaking cacaphony of human misery here that the corporate media have duly coopted to ensure their quarterly market share goes back up. To not pay attention would be being out of touch. Yes, there are plenty of other things going on in the world, but this one is important, because it's the one the corporate media has a monopoly on -- and so much better than Iraq, which is tapped out and too full of influential toes to step on.

My point is not, of course, that the ME is of no import. It is simply this: crisis are everywhere. You get to pick which ones you address, and some of them are closer to you than others. If you feel obliged to do something about the ME, then join a call for peace, do your part, and be done with it. Nobody will think worse of you if you only do a small bit -- you are half a world away. Just remember that nobody will think better of you this time around if you find yourself posting your photo on "sorryeveryone2006", because that crisis was in your own back yard, and you were the schmoe that was supposed to take care of that one.

In parting, some lyrics from an album as important to listen to today, as it was back in 1992:

Water pistol man full of ammunition
squirtin' at fires on a worldwide mission
but did you ever think to stop to squirt the flowers
in your own backyard

(Album info)

[mike_c]

1. bingo-- and the doctored photos didn't even attempt...

...to be convincing. More smoke! Bigger explosions!

[insane_cratic_gal]

2. I think you 100 percent correct about that

here is another one of his photos.. it's probably photoshopped to bring out color and such here.

But the other is an obvious display of Print me... what I don't get is how he has no idea how to use photoshop? It's a hack job i'd expect from a first time user..not a paid Photographer.. something else is suspect too



here he does a fine job


http://www.boston.com/news/world/middleeast/articles/2006/07/24/rice_urges_ceasefire_but_lebanon_battles_rage_on/

and here as well.. so what gives?




and another photo from the same shot





now why use the shopped one? this one is far stronger?

[izzie]

3. Wasn't their something about a doctored one on Bush ?

Not on the ship not showing it was so near land but one with military men behind him? I am sure it goes on a lot mostly in being cropped. Also it is hard to tell because they re-run stuff over and over. One hardly knows if it is the 100th or what time we have seen it.

[misanthrope]

4. Finally someone gets to the root...

..of the matter. It was driven by sensationalism. That in turn is driven by greed which is a cornerstone of, and virtue within, conservative philosophy.

[HysteryDiagnosis]

5. Examples, old and new.... equally stunning examples at link:

http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/farid/research/digitaltampering/

Digital Tampering in the Media, Politics and Law

Photography, of course, lost its innocence many years ago. In as early as the 1920s, shortly after the first commercially available camera was introduced, Lenin had his enemies "air-brushed" out of photographs. With the advent of high-resolution digital cameras, powerful personal computers and sophisticated photo-editing software, the manipulation of digital images is becoming more common.



March 2004: This political ad for George W. Bush, as he was running for President, shows a sea of soldiers as a back drop to a child holding a flag. This image was digitally doctored by copying and pasting, from this original photograph, several soldiers to digitally remove Bush from a podium. After acknowledging that the photo had been doctored, the Bush campaign said that the ad would be re-edited and re-shipped to TV stations.

[chill_wind]

8. Thanks for this link. Great reference.

Holy cow, aming others, I'd forgotten the Kerry/Fonda job!

[HysteryDiagnosis]

9. Ubet...... these internets are astounding tools.... Seriesly. :)

[Solo_in_MD]

6. And the comparisions ot "Rathergate" are already starting

The M$M is being its own worst enemy. E&P and the publishing trade groups need to quit whinning and start producing.

[Jeffersons Ghost]

7. K&R here's a 5th vote!

[theHandpuppet]

10. A zinger of a post!

K&R.

[Taxloss]

11. I think you're right, to an extent.

The photos enhance prejudice on both sides, be they orientalist or occidentalist.

[Cessna Invesco Palin]

12. I don't have time to read your entire post today...

...but what I see of it makes sense. Reccomending, and bookmarking for later when it's not so crazy.

[Igel]

13. It was from a Lebanese freelancer, it seems,

and Reuter's suspended the photographer.

Adding to the frenzy is that the photographer who was in Beirut and submitted the doctored photo was also in Qana last Sunday, and submitted some of the more printable pictures of a 'rescue worker' (the same worker also showed up in Srifa the next day, and Tyre a day or two later, always being photographed holding up corpses).

It's sensationalism. Pure and simple. But that presumes that the photographer's primary purpose was income.

We know that Israel controls media access to its soldiers and where it's fighting. Hezb does the same. Israeli journalists are accused of slanting things their way; if the Lebanese are uniting behind Hezbolla, they deserve the same suspicion.

[Gregorian]

14. Survivor.

This is why I don't watch football. I have never seen Survivor. And I don't watch Fox.


The gist of your post, to me, is that Americans have no empathy. I can only explain it as lack of experience. Only a few Americans have first hand experience of how it feels to be a victim.

There is no valor in the enjoyment of victimization.

[skids]

17. Oh I think Americans have empathy...

...they may be a bit desensitized, sure, but empathy plays a part in getting us all wrapped up in it, while the dinner burns on the stove, so to speak. Not all virtues are without their disadvantages.

[Lusted4]

15. I'll take all my news events no matter what media, unedited please.

I'm an adult and I'll make my own interpretation of them.

[porphyrian]

16. Not me, I'm not a corporate news consumer.

In fact, I stopped watching that shit in 2000 and haven't had a second thought about it since.

[furman]

18. Have you considered that maybe it really is bias against Israel?

I was disappointed when I read this thread based on the subject line
"What the doctored Reuters photos tell us... about ourselves."

I thought that your posting and the repsonses would be more in the line of
exposing instances of bias against Israel in Middle East reporting, and that therefore
we cannot believe everything we read.

Instead you say its all about "sensationalism".
I think it is Reuters trying to portray a bias against Israeli actions in Lebanon.

DUers are so quick to condemn Israel but slow to condemn its opponents.

DUers should realize that there are instances of bias for and against Israel
in many major news media outlets, including Reuters

[Joe Chi Minh]

19. Their excitement at this notion of a thoroughly anodyne motiv-

ation on the part of the Reuters photo-shopper, suggests a guilty political motivation on their own part that they seek to disown - an understandable defensiveness.

Difficult though it is to imagine a more obnoxious hate-filled crew than the rabbis of the far right, it is, unfortunately, the self-righteous utopianism of Western liberals that is primarily responsible for the bloodshed of all the thousands and thousands of innocent Palestinians and Lebanese down the years - the people who, in every society, just want to get on with their lives; for whom a regime change will not inevitably lead to a better stadard of living for themselves.

To refuse to take on board that the State of Israel is a 'fait accompli', that it is not going to go away any time, never mind any time soon, but rather to encourage the Arabic world to believe that public opinion will return Israel to a Palestinian State, is a kind of madness, quite catastrophic for the mass of the Palestinians and Lebanese people. And ironically, the same liberals have been led in this madness by the far-right media moguls of the West, whose agenda, whatever it is in any matter, always means trouble for the countries and peoples they exploit.

[skids]

21. I've seen bias both ways.

An example would be that the Hizbollah-caused forest fires in Isreal got more press, until recently, than the immensly more disasterous oil spill that Isreal has caused.

I don't trust the media, period, not the Hizbollah-biased sources nor the Isreal-biased sources. Frankly, there are hardly none that aren't biased one way or the other. One thing they both share in common is a bias towards getting money from their advertisers.

And so it is against their interest to present the news without bias, because the bias adds intrigue to the story, and we can all march out to the discussion boards and argue about who is biased against who.

Meanwhile, back home our own problems go untended. The time spent paying attention to the war over there and bickering about bias absorbed all the time that people had for current affairs. They didn't have time to learn about how their congresscritter was profitting from slave labor in the CNMI, or that the housing market is crashing, or that Mexico's president used 250 million dollars worth of public tax money for the campaign and election fraud that "won" calderon the election, or the real story about how Venezuela's economy is doing, or what our options really are for ditching fossil fuels, or how Sweden almost had a nuclear reactor melt down last week, or a million other things both local and global.

Nope, is was way more important to hit the blogs and grasp at any straw to advocate for whichever side in the ME they have decided to take a liking to.

I. Don't. Care. Who. Is. Biased.

None of it can be trusted anyway.

[cgrindley]

20. I'm assuming that the photog was a Hizbollah supporter

and that I shouldn't trust a single image coming out of Lebanon.

[chill_wind]

22. You shouldn't trust 90% of what comes out of the American MSM

cable newsroom either.


CNN's history of affliliated Military PsyOps (FAIR)

Don't assume for a minute that any Reuters image from Lebanon might be the only instrument of military media dysinfo.

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=364x1839026

[Lone_Star_Dem]

23. Yep, just like sex sells

You can bet if they thought that blowing up a pair of boobs to epic size would have gotten more money out of the pic then that is what they would have done.

This is what my first thought was when I heard about it, and now after having seen the pics, I feel confident that your assessment is correct.

[mogster]

24. Splendid post, thanks for taking the time

This story is so interesting. I'll keep it on hold until more facts about the mysterious Hajj appear.