“The media can be inaccurate…no…really? Okay so I’m being sarcastic. But there are fallacies and inaccuracies floating around. As I have said in past blog entries sometimes the media gets in so much of a hurry to get a story that they don’t get all the facts before they run it. Could it be because they think that bloggers will break the story before they can? It’s a theory.
I borrowed this from an article about the “blogosphere” which compares it to a collective like the Borg in Star Trek.
Weblogs scoop you at every turn, breaking “your” stories before you have a chance to rush your article to press. And even if you do manage to break a story, weblogs take it over, dissecting every point you made and pushing your logic to every inevitable conclusion. Forget that follow-up you had planned – ‘blogs have already anticipated and published every point you might have made.
http://www.microcontentnews.com/articles/borgjournalism.htm
“We are the blogs. Journalism will be assimilated. Resistance is futile.”
More seriously though is Hezbollah’s PR tactics. I got a report from GIYUS.org today. The reporter explains Hezbollah’s methods of manipulating media coverage.
As more and more stories of faked photography comes out of southern Lebanon, leading news correspondents shed light on how Hezbollah treats the media.
Apparently Hezbollah runs daily press tours exposing reporters to damage inflicted by Israel’s air strikes. Rocket launching locations are never revealed, especially since most of them are located in schools, hospitals and private homes.
Reporters are often threatened to follow the rules set by the Party of God, or else. Journalists are photographed and they have a copy of everyone’s passport.
So keep your eyes and ears open and scrutinize all information coming out of Lebanon.
The Reuters news agency has also found itself in hot water lately because of doctored photos.
“What’s the big deal over a little faked smoke?” That seems to be the prevailing attitude among media pooh-bahs irked by bloggers who exposed the crude Photoshoppery of a Reuters photographer over the weekend. The cameraman, prolific Lebanese stringer and chronicler of Hizballah Adnan Hajj, was fired.
From the fake “massacre” in Jenin, to the false accusations against Israel in the shooting of Palestinian boy Mohammed al-Dura, to the dissemination of “Pallywood” terrorist video productions, to the false labeling of executed Shiite fishermen in a Haditha sports stadium as victims of U.S. Marines, the Reuterization of war journalism goes far beyond Reuters.
Reuters can kill a few pictures, but it does not kill persistent doubts about the American media’s ability to cover this war through anything but a distorted lens. The blogosphere can help clear the bogus smoke. Only the Old Media itself can stamp out the toxic fire.
http://www.townhall.com/columnists/MichelleMalkin/2006/08/09/the_reuterization_of_war_journalism
It’s important to understand that there is not just a single fraudulent Reuters photograph, nor even only one kind of fraudulent photograph. There are in fact dozens of photographs whose authenticity has been questioned, and they fall into four distinct categories.
The four types of photographic fraud perpetrated by Reuters photographers and editors are:
1. Digitally manipulating images after the photographs have been taken.
2. Photographing scenes staged by Hezbollah and presenting the images as if they were of authentic spontaneous news events.
3. Photographers themselves staging scenes or moving objects, and presenting photos of the set-ups as if they were naturally occurring.
4. Giving false or misleading captions to otherwise real photos that were taken at a different time or place.
All of these forms of fraud have the same intent: to serve as propaganda for Hezbollah, and to make the Israeli attacks look as brutal as possible. And, taken together, they raise a very serious question: can any of the coverage by the entrenched media be trusted?
For more details of the fraudulent photos go to:
http://www.zombietime.com/reuters_photo_fraud/
Also from Reuters comes another case of false news reporting:
The day after it was revealed that a Reuters News Agency doctored photographs to show an anti-Israel bias, the news service incorrectly reported Tuesday afternoon that the IDF bombed a funeral procession in Lebanon.
Reuters has corrected without apology its earlier story that the IDF strafed a funeral procession and updated the report to state that the bombs struck a village at the same time the funeral was taking place, adding that “the air strike was not in the immediate vicinity of the funeral.”
http://www.israelnn.com/news.php3?id=109521
Unbelievable! They mislead people with a false report and they don’t even apologize for it. (I happen to know a few people like that. They can wrong a person, but won’t apologize for anything.)
Bloggers do keep an eye on the media to point out inaccuracies and fallacies in reportage. Here are a few of them who have blogged about the fraudulent photos:
http://www.oldwardogs.us/2006/08/fauxtography_at.html
http://www.rightwinged.com/2006/08/more_media_lies_hezbo_with_gun.html
http://michellemalkin.com/archives/005687.htm
http://mypetjawa.mu.nu/archives/184242.php
http://www.riehlworldview.com/carnivorous_conservative/2006/08/americas_wastel.html
In closing today’s blog entry, here is a link to a flash film I got from Honest Reporting about the myths and facts of the conflict with Lebanon:
