07 August, 2006

Extreme Makeover - Beirut Edition

Reuters doubles the destruction by recycling the same event and the BBC falls for it.

Here's another example.

As TigerHawk notes Reuters has not apologised and concludes:
If a company in any other industry had internal controls this bad, the press would drop the hammer and hold the CEO accountable.
In this case the press isn't even discovering fakery in its own industry. People blogging in their PJ's are.

What of this video? Sorry it's a youtube video, so those under The Great Proxy will not be able to view it.

10 comments:

Woke said...

John,
These links are posted in the comments of Sams earlier post?

samuraisam said...

woke: they are not the same, and Chilton actually posted about the modified smoke images first, I hadn't read it when I made my post.

John B. Chilton said...

I did not notice that these were. It's a developing (heh) story.

The link I gave in my earlier post "Reuters Picture Kill" on the subject turns out to be dynamic and is being updated with more and more of these examples.

The video I linked to is something I'd be interested in the community commenting on.

nzm said...

Interesting video, John.

Unfortunately stuff like this happens a lot.

marwan said...

The 'Pallywood' video is quite interesting, and would be more effective if it wasn't so obviously pro-Israeli.

There's definitely been some media pandering on both sides. Both sides need bodies, grisly as it may seem, for their daily laments and if there aren't any, well, mother of invention and all.

It's not helped by Wire services, desperate for the "burning monk" moment, which they can flash around the world with their name attached, who are prepared to publish almost anything. It's also not helped by friends like the Lebanese President, who leapt to the inform the world of another 40 dead, looking for a sequel to Qana where there was none.

People are not props on a stage.

bandicoot said...

Marwan, I think Mr. Siniora was repeating in good faith what he was informed (or misinformed) by others. Somebody got it wrong; a case of the fog of war? (and in this war there is too much of it as building after building is bombed flat). Apparently the building in Houla was destroyed completely and nobody thought the 40-60 or so people inside it survived; miraculously they did (except for one). In defense of Mr. Siniora, he at least had no trouble correcting the reports in his press conference and put things in perspective.
However I think if you count the dead civilians who fell throughout Lebanon today, I'd be surprised if they don't top 40. It's a massacre nevertheless, but just a bit more "equally" distributed among the South, Bekaa and Beirut areas.

bandicoot said...

In the Reuters "same woman" photo, one can think of multiple posible scenarios. Notably the photos are taken by 2 different photographers (Issam Kobeisi and Hussein Malla). It's not inconceivable that the same woman from the same neighborhood appeared in 2 different photos by 2 photographers separated by a 2 week period. Assuming she is the same woman, the problem might be whether she is in both cases actually inspecting her property. One can imagine she is doing different things, inspecting the flat, building, the street, checking on neighbors, etc. A photographer may assume she is just checking on her apartment, without actually asking specifically to confirm the facts (including asking for the name).

There are other possibilities, but that’s not my main concern here; let's even assume the images are completely doctored and staged; the question then is, what do you do with this find, and where do you go from here? Ok, you proved one picture false; what about the next 600,000 or 5000,000 or whatever number of pictures taken by hundreds or thousands of people over the past 4 weeks of this war?

As much as it's important to weed out forgeries and sloppy journalism/photography, I have a feeling that much of the effort in this area (or much of what I’ve seen so far) stems from pure propaganda. It's like there is some sort of concerted "campaign" to hunt (often very amateurishly) for suspicious photograph and mistaken journalistic reports and then use this to cast doubt on the credibility of all the evidence and the authenticity of the suffering of the people. And that's a lot worse and more sinister than the unintentional (or even intentional) reproduction of the same photo twice by a major news agency.

bandicoot said...

As for the same bombed building case, again and without relieving Reuters from its responsibilities, I'd like to think it's a simple question of human mistake. I don't think there is a shortage of destroyed buildings in Beirut to make a photographer or his agency so desperate that they recycle the same photo. Also many areas in the South Beirut area apparently were bombed repeatedly, on different days and nights, sometimes the same buildings or nearby ones getting hit again; this and the immense destruction everywhere might have contributed to such mistakes.

Anonymous said...

Yeah..Yeah...

I guess women and children killed and maimed is not news anymore, especially if they are arabs and muslims....but photoshoped images are....


Warn the culture centers in the west the barbarians have learned to use photoshop for the purpose of disinformation...


Forget the fake WMD presentation made by Powell, forget the fake intellegince document that Blair cited...forget the 250,000 lives that those lies took....

But don't forget that the extra smoke and a couple of mis-dated pics is something that the brain farts that have no regard for human life can't seem to shut up about....

Not only this is racist it is disgusting and ignaorant...

For a rela report on media maniplation check out the link here:

http://www.amiri.info/2006/07/24/manipulation/

Anonymous said...

The whole of the lebanese people have been victimzied by the events of the past month. They do not need a stand-in to portray their grief, if you take a picture of any lebanese from the street you will see the same emotions portrayed by man, woman or child, thats if they are still alive. The numbers dont lie, 1000 killed and thousands injured their pain cannot be doctored by an image and its a shame that a bunch of people are working as apologists for these massacers, the whole act is a massacer of lebanon, no photoshop needed.

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