Major Update/Retraction On Photographer Of Hezbollywood Rescuer/Corpse Production

A full retraction may be in order.

I jumped the gun.*

The photo does not appear staged for effect.

It is not true that the man was claimed to be among the dead.

The caption to this photo that runs with this article:'

TYRE, LEBANON. Wednesday, July 26, 2006: After an Israeli airstrike destroyed two buildings in downtown Tyre, Lebanon, one man helped another who had fallen and was hurt. As people searched through the burning remains, aircraft again could be heard overhead, panicking the people that a second strike was coming.

It's not inconceivable at all that he slipped and fell during this process. In any event, he does not appear to have been identified as "dead" when the picture ran.

Major, major error.

Damnit.

All that shit about things seeming plausible because it seems to "fit the facts"?

Applies to me too. Worse, too.

Thanks to Brett.

* Note: I wrote "we" jumped the gun intially, rather than I jumped the gun. I have no right to speak for anyone else. As the update below demonstrates, the NYT is guilty at the very least of extremely misleading captioning. Other people may have played this differently and have nothing at all to retract.

Another Update: Check the very misleading caption at the bottom of the pic at Michelle's. (It's probably at Gateway Pundit, too.)

The caption reads:

The mayor of Tyre said that in the worst-hit areas, bodies were still buried under the rubble, and he appealed to the Israelis to allow government authorities to pull them out.

That is extraordinarily misleading for a caption accompanying a picture of a man who is "buried under rubble" and appears to be dead.

I don't know how to categorize this one. This is either an inadvertantly misleading caption by someone who wasn't paying attention, or a deliberate effort by the New York Times to suggest that this dramatic-looking "corpse" was one of the dead.

However, as the caption linked at DigitalJournalist says that he was merely fallen and "hurt," it is not the case that the photographer was shooting pictures of a guy playing dead.

The "fallen" man may have taken the pose of a dead man to get just this sort of shot, but the whole charge seems much more speculative now.

Thanks to Allah for pointing out this caption after I shot him the alert on the retraction.

It looked like it was a deliberate attempt to stage a "death." Now it looks more likely that it's a sloppy or deliberately deceptive caption slapped on the photo at the New York times.

Retraction of the Retraction? I wouldn't go that far, but yeah, it sure does look the caption that most people saw strongly implied, on the verge of flat-out stating, that this man was dead. And buried in rubble by an Israeli strike.

He wasn't. At most, he slipped and fell. And who knows if even that much happened.

"Hurt" people are usually pretty animated, unless they're unconscious. They are, you know, hurt -- in pain, grabbing a limb, gritting their teeth.

This guy does appear to be as blissful as only a sleeping baby or the grateful dead can be.

But, of course, he may have passed out from heat exhaustion, fallen, and received an injury in the process -- making the Digital Journalist caption pretty accurate.

All I can say is that it's a lot less clean of a catch now. That other caption -- the one not running on the NYT -- seems to dispel the idea of a propaganda show that deceived the photographer into identifying a live man as dead.

It could still be propaganda. And the NYT still did identify a live man as dead -- or at least strongly suggest that with their wildly misleading caption.

I don't know. It seemed smoking-gun huge when I first saw it. There are still shenanigans going on here, but not enough to really crush the NYT.

They make this kind of shoddy mistake (or "mistake") day-in, day-out.

It's their stock in trade.

posted by Ace at 08:11 PM

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