Israel Matzav

False Images

I don't know about all of you, but I was outraged yesterday at Reuters' admission that they used a doctored photograph of Beirut. This is the sort of thing we all suspected was going on all along in 'Palestine,' where after an Italian film crew 'apologized' for filming the lynch of two Israeli soldiers in 2000, all the photographers and reporters for the news services were replaced by local 'Palestinian' stringers. I have no doubt that one could write a doctoral thesis on the use of similarly 'touched up' photographs during the course of the 'intifadeh,' if one could find the time to go through them all.

I was trying to put my outrage into a bit longer post than the above, but because I have work to do and because I spent too much time on another post this morning, I have had some difficulty finding the time to do so. Then I found this post at Ace of Spades HQ, which I think does what I have been trying to concentrate enough to do:

As I've argued, these foreign stringers, with obvious political biases in favor of Hezbollah and their fellow Ismamists, keep coming up with suspiciously dramatic images that of course inflame Muslim passions.

One has to wonder-- how do they keep getting so lucky? I have written before about these suspiciously-dramatic pictures, and the obvious fact that they are being "sweetened," staged, manipulated, dressed like a Hollywood set for maximum propaganda value.

This practice is unethical, this practice is propaganada, and this practice is, in short, a lie.

...

Let me clue the media in on something: The idea that reporters and photographers should be perfectly neutral in a war is somewhat controversial in America. Reporters all seem to believe it, but most of the public actually thinks that Americans should sort of side with Americans.

Why is it that the American and European media assume that Muslims -- some of the most tribally, ethnically loyal people on the face of the earth -- buy into this standard of complete robotic objectivity, when they can't even manage to convince their fellow Americans it's the proper ethics of journalism?

They always lecture us how we should understand more about the Muslim culture. Have any of these morons actually attempted a probing inquiry into whether the culture of these foreign-born Muslim stringers actually accepts the idea of neutrality and objectivity in a war against the infidel Americans and Zionist Jew Pigs?

Or are they just projecting their own Western values on to them, in a bit of racist Orientalism?

Read the whole thing and look at the pictures he presents.

posted by Carl in Jerusalem @ 3:56 PM