Good Question: Where Are The Pictures Of Hezbollah Gunmen?

I completely missed this. Let Confederate Yankee put you some f'n' knowlege:

Scan the photos coming out of Hezbollah-controlled Lebanon, and you'll see and unending stream of dramatic photos of dead women and children and anguished rescue workers climbing through the remains of bombed-out residential buildings, and you will see heart-rending photos of toys in the rubble. You will see mourning. You will see pain. You will see a civilian infrastructure in tatters.

What you will not see, except in very rare cases, is Hezbollah.

The "Party of God," well-known for their parades of armed masked men in the past, have vanished into the ether. You will see no Hezbollah fighters brandishing their weapons with bravado. You will see no photos of Hezbollah’s rocket launchers or rockets prepared to fire upon Israel’s civilian population. You will see no photographs of shattered launchers or weapons caches or even fighting aged men amid the rubble. The media itself quietly reports that anyone who does take such pictures may be killed, though you wouldn’t know it from the amount of attention that disturbing detail has received in the press.

He notes many media figures admitting to being "handled," guided, harrassed, or threatened by Hezbollah, showing what Hezbollah wants to be seen, not showing what Hezbollah wishes to be invisible.

I don't blame reporters for not getting tough when armed lunatics have weapons in their faces. Fine-- but make damn-sure you report that context, every time your report on the story at all, and try to balance that thuggish censorship back at the safety of Big Media HQ by spinning opposite of Hezbollah, in order to achieve, as is best possible, a counterbalance, and hence a rough approximation of the truth.

We've been focusing on what the media is showing -- an endless parade of the victims of war. Confederate Yankee is right to ask about what is not being shown-- the actual thugs and killers who make victims of the Lebanese.

No wonder the world has the idea that this war is being fought by the IDF against the Lebanese citizenry-- the stories, and especially the pictures, flowing from the warzone depict precisely that.

You don't need Hezbollah's cooperation to file written reports on battles-- you can embed with an IDF unit, or at least interview their soldiers after the action.

But to get pictures, you have to be right there when it happens. And to be right there when it happens, you have to appease Hezbollah-- or else you might just be murdered.

We see a lot of stuffed animals and tricycles and Korans and bombed homes.

When do we get to see the gunmen, the rockets, and the killers themselves?

This is not a rhetorical question. Not entirely. I am really curious as to the MSM 's opinion:

If it is impossible due to Hezbollah's thuggery to accurately report on the conflict, is it better to appease them and file a largely untruthful report, which nevertheless does serve to fill airtime, or simply not report at all?

What is worse to a journalist -- reporting what is largely a lie or not reporting at all?

I know economics weigh heavily in favor of reporting the lie. A blank screen can't be used to sell commercial space. But what does journalistic ethics, ignoring economic demands, dictate?

Via Riehl World View, who combines, in one post, my recent passions, attacking the MSM's eagerness to play the mark to foreign stringer hustlers, and Ned Lamont's annoying strain of Limousine Liberalism.

posted by Ace at 11:37 PM

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