In my long and checkered career I've had occasion to work as an editor on two newspapers, by which I picked up a passing knowledge of how to recognize a faked news photo or film-clip. For example, a picture shown on CNN purportedly showing three Palestinian schoolgirls weeping about their neighborhood being bombed by the wicked-wicked Israelis; it showed all three girls with identically-patterned headcloths, identically draped, and their faces artfully painted with
identically airbrushed make-up. I also noted a Hamas film-clip that claimed to show artillery-fire from an Israeli battleship far out in the sea hitting a playground in Gaza City; it didn't show any flash or trail of smoke from the ship, but only showed an explosion in the city -- and the smoke-trail pointed in the wrong direction. I could also point out how you can tell that at least 99% of the famous Abu Ghraib photos are fakes, but that's a subject for a whole 'nother article. The point is, the media even here in the US have been showing shamelessly faked videos -- not to mention shamelessly tailored facts -- for a very long time.
It's been especially interesting watching the major news media of the western world, for the last couple weeks, try their best to raise sympathy for the Hamas jihadists in Gaza and do anything to make Israel -- and Jews in general -- look bad.
This is from http://www.tabletmag.com/scroll/181206/new-york-times-slams-its-own-pulitzer-prize-winning-photographer-in-gaza
"If you have ever wondered why the
New York Times photo
coverage from Gaza has almost exclusively consisted of dead and
bleeding Palestinian children in Shifa Hospital, with nary a Hamas
gunman or missile launch from a school or a mosque to fill out the
narrative of events on the ground, the newspaper of record has an
astonishing answer: Pulitzer Prize-winning photographer Tyler Hicks
really sucks at his job.
"For anyone who knows anything about photojournalism, the
Times’s
answer raises some very serious questions about the sanity of the
people who are running the newspaper, as well as the paper’s loyalty to
one of the greatest photographers of his era who has put his life at
risk for the newspaper time and time again in global hot spots and
conflict zones.
"But according to Eileen Murphy, the Times Vice President for
Corporate Communications, the paper’s photographers in Gaza, led by
Hicks, are the sole reason for the radical imbalance in the
Times photo coverage of the war. Or at least that’s what she told Uriel Heilman of JTA, when he
asked the
Times
to explain why, out of the 37 images that made up the paper’s last 3
slideshows from Gaza, there wasn’t a single image of a Hamas fighter or
rocket launch or anything else that might signal to readers that Israel
hadn’t simply decided to maim and murder Palestinian children in the
coastal enclave for sport.
"Incredibly, the first part of Murphy’s answer blamed
Times photographers for apparently submitting only a handful of low-quality images:
Our photo editor went through all of our pictures
recently and out of many hundreds, she found 2 very distant poor quality
images that were captioned Hamas fighters by our photographer on the
ground. It is very difficult to identify Hamas because they don’t have
uniforms or any visible insignia; our photographer hasn’t even seen
anyone carrying a gun.
"Is this really how a legendary photojournalist like Tyler Hicks
operates? Two very distant low-quality images, and nary a sight of a
single person carrying a gun in all of Gaza during a three-week long
conflict in which over 1500 people have died? If Hicks’ assignment took
him anywhere else besides Gaza, one might suspect him of holding up the
hotel bar.
"The rest of Murphy’s answer provides only a tiny bit of insight into why Hicks’ performance has been so poor:
I would add that we would not withhold photos of Hamas
militants. We eagerly pursue photographs from both sides of the
conflict, but we are limited by what our photographers have access to.
"The key word in the second part of Murphy’s response, of course, is
“access.” Tyler Hicks is hardly lying down on the job: He’s doing
incredibly hard and dangerous work in a combat zone where photographers
are hardly free to take pictures of whatever they want. Which is the key
point that Murphy and her bosses are determined to elide.
"What the
Times and other mainstream news outlets seem
determined to hide from their readers is that their photographers and
reporters are hardly allowed to roam freely. In fact, they are working
under terribly difficult conditions under the effective control of a
terrorist organization which–as the war itself indicates–doesn’t
hesitate to maim, kidnap, and kill people that it doesn’t like.
"How does being dependent on Hamas for your daily access–not to
mention your life–potentially impact coverage? Well, the fact that the
Times has only two distant, grainy, unusable images of Hamas gunmen from Tyler Hicks tells you all you need to know, doesn’t it.
"If your imagination needs more help, here’s Liel Liebovitz’s column in Tablet:
In recent days alone, we’ve heard the account of Gabriele Barbati, an Italian journalist who, once leaving Gaza, tweeted:
“Out of #Gaza far from #Hamas retaliation: misfired rocket killed
children yday in Shati. Witness: militants rushed and cleared debris.”
We’ve also heard from Radjaa Abou Dagga, a former correspondent for
France’s Liberation whose attempts
at practicing honest journalism got him summoned by Hamas thugs,
accused of collaborating with Israel, and told to stop working as a
reporter and leave the strip at once.
"By playing coy with readers about the reasons why coverage is so imbalanced, the
Times
may think that it’s defending the work of its reporters and
photographers. In fact, it’s making them and the paper look
foolish–while serving as the propaganda arm of a terrorist organization.
Someone at the paper needs to devote some serious attention to the
reasoning that has transformed difficult working conditions on the
ground into a glaring editorial failure."
And obviously it isn't just the
New York Times playing this game.
Even when the TV news channels are handed clear videos showing Hamas jihadists launching rockets at Israel from the roofs of private houses, hospitals, schools, and even UN shelter buildings, they show as little of the footage (maybe 5 seconds) as possible -- and then it's back to long minutes of pix of wounded Palestinian children. You have to go search on the Internet to find actual photos of those tunnels that the Hamas jihadists dug into Israel, and videos that identify the buildings from which Hamas keeps firing rockets.
As to why Hamas would draw fire onto UN shelters, why, it's a win-win situation for them. Those UN missions included schools that dared to teach women and female children heresies like reading, writing, mathematics, science, real history, and critical thinking. Getting the Israelis to bomb those buildings -- by the usual tactic of climbing up on the roof and firing a few rockets toward Israel -- would get rid of that problem while making the wicked-wicked Jews look bad.
I leave to the readers' imaginations just why the western news media have tried so hard to spread anti-Israel pro-jihadist propaganda, but be it noted that this attempt is failing -- largely thanks to the Internet. When it's possible to see (and analyze) pictures, videos and witnesses' reports from humble on-the-spot citizens with no more than cell-phones and Internet accounts, it gets really hard to limit viewers' news to only what the government and its tame media-flaks want them to think Thus it's growing harder for Hamas to convincingly howl "Foul!" when everyone with uncensored Internet access can see its sins: shelling its own people, preventing its own people from getting out of the danger zones, using women and children for human shields, breaking every cease-fire that Israel has agreed to, constantly firing rockets at Israel and then wailing when Israel hits back -- with pinpoint precision. The evidence relentlessly exonerates Israel, and the best propaganda artists in the business can't hide it all.
And the media flacks themselves have begun to see the tide of public opinion turning. Note how TV news in the last few days has begun showing a bit more balanced coverage, as if worried about complaints from the audience. The audience can no longer be lied to as completely as in Nazi Germany, or the old USSR, or even the US in the heyday of William Randolph Hearst.
This is why the Internet must remain free and uncensored. We have to combat every attempt by every government we can reach to pass censorship laws. We must also support the efforts of every hacker who can break any technology that threatens such censorship -- not just the Electronic Freedom Foundation and Anonymous.
And, of course, it helps to learn how to identify a media fake when you see it.
--Leslie <;)))><