Wednesday, August 09, 2006
Complicity in the staging of fauxtographs
In addition to publishing war photographs that they have manipulated, our esteemed media have also published photographs of people and events that have been staged. Jonah Goldberg republished a very telling passage from a report by CNN's Anderson Cooper:
ANDERSON COOPER, CNN ANCHOR: Well, you know, you have to be very careful. Obviously, both sides in this conflict want their stories out. Israel, you know, provides public spokespeople very readily. If you're dealing with the Israeli military, they don't want you, you know, wandering around their artillery fields like where we are now, or wandering around their positions. So they often have press people who will actually sort of help you if you need interviews and the like.
While on the Hezbollah side, it's really interesting — I was in Beirut, and they took me on this sort of guided tour of the Hezbollah- controlled territories in southern Lebanon that were heavily bombed. They are much cruder, obviously. They don't have the experience in this kind of thing. But they clearly want the story of civilian casualties out. That is their — what they're heavily pushing, to the point where on this tour I was on, they were just making stuff up. They had six ambulances lined up in a row and said, OK, you know, they brought reporters there, they said you can talk to the ambulance drives. And then one by one, they told the ambulances to turn on their sirens and to zoom off, and people taking that picture would be reporting, I guess, the idea that these ambulances were zooming off to treat civilian casualties, when in fact, these ambulances were literally going back and forth down the street just for people to take pictures of them. (bold emphasis added)
Of course, since Anderson Cooper knows who took the pictures of those play-acting ambulances, and can verify whether any of them were published as "news." It is, perhaps, too much to hope that some combination of competitive zeal and professional integrity would motivate Cooper to tell us who played along, and who didn't.
2 Comments:
By 
Assistant Village Idiot, at
Wed Aug 09, 11:59:00 PM:
The MSM is developing something similar to the attitude that various professional groups such as the police or doctors have, who feel they are under attack from those who don't understand the situation and thus move to protect their own. Though that is an understandable attitude, it has been shown in the professions above to result in increased corruption and less protection for the public.
That's not a good sign from the people who are supposed to be providing us with the information we need to make decisions.
By 
, at
Fri Aug 11, 05:49:00 AM:
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