Like This, For Example

Dead to rights. Clean kill.

The same flattened buildings are pictured multiple times with captions each time suggesting they had only recently been hit by airstrikes.

Three times the propagandistic property damage for the price of one.

Leigh sent me this tip earlier but I wasn't sure whether or not to go with it, because I wasn't sure the pictures were actually misleading. The media has a tendency to break and then re-"break" a story it wants to push, heralding it each time as if it's a new story; but that's not really a major sin, so long as they're not trying to suggest each of the new "scoops" is about a different incident.

He later offered up a lot more evidence but I didn't get around to looking at it until now. You snooze, you lose.

The first picture seems okay. As far as we know. It says the buildings were flattened July 18 (or the night before). Fair enough.

But the captions -- supplied by LGF -- on the last two photograps of the same flattened buildings say the buildings were flattened later:

Journalists are shown by a Hizbollah guerrilla group the damage caused by Israeli attacks on a Hizbollah stronghold in southern Beirut, July 24 2006.

A Lebanese woman looks at the sky as she walks past a building flattened during an overnight Israeli air raid on Beirut’s suburbs August 5, 2006.

By the way-- last two photos? Adnan Hajj. Which is, frankly, disappointing. I want to start bringing other stringers down, not the same one.

Now a Clinton-level parser could claim that those captions don't explicitly say the damage occurred the night before the bombing. Like that last caption-- one could say the raid that flattened was "overnight," just as suggested, just not overnight the night before, but rather overnight two weeks ago on July 18.

But of course it is quite dleiberately implied by the pictures that in each case we are looking at fresh, new bomb damage, not the same damn buidlings on just three different dates.

What the hell is the newsvalue of such pictures? Did Reuters imagine it was necessary to show the world that the buildings had not, in fact, self-re-assembled themselves over the course of two and a half weeks? The Despair Of War: Structures Have Simply Given Up Rebuilding Themselves.

This is good evidence of the fundamental unity of interests between the MSM and the hustlers and the Hezbollah propagandists:

Each wants the "juiciest," most dramatic, most graphic, most macabre pictures available... or, if not available, then at least achievable. Each wants as many of these pictures as possible as frequently as possible. Each wants, whether for purposes of salability or political propaganda, pictures demonstrating the most widespread and severe damage.

Is it any wonder that Reuters was "duped" into taking the Hajj's hoax photos? All cons work upon the principle of greed or desire. The mark has to very much want what you're offering him, or else he has no interest at all in participating in your scam.

It doesn't matter if Hajj faked photos for simple salability or for political propaganda against Israel; either way, his faked photos have the same result, which is both to get bought and to propagandize against Israel. Likewise, it hardly matters if Reuters turned off its skepticism to get juicy, buzz-worthy photos or did so because of its institutional hostility towards Israel; either way, it both got buzz-worthy pictures out there and expressed its institutional hostility towards Israel.

If I can admit my own biases, for God's sake, why are the media such goddamn narcissistic children that they cannot admit, and be on patrol for, their own?

Thanks again to Leigh. Wish I'd jumped on this earlier.

posted by Ace at 09:29 PM

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