The Right Blogosphere is in a substantial ferment about Reuters having published one or many photographs taken by a stringer in Lebanon that, apparently, had been digitally altered. There’s a pretty fair round-up of opinion at The American Thinker. I agree that it’s troubling that a major news outlet would exercise so little oversight over stringers. What’s missing, I think, from their criticism is that it doesn’t really matter.
First, the actual effects. It makes little difference whether on a particular day in a particular shot there was a lot of smoke over Beirut or a little. The fact is that Israeli bombs and missiles have done substantial damage to Beirut, some to Hezbollah facilities, some to innocents. The publication of the pictures doesn’t increase or reduce the damage to Beirut. And now that the pictures have been published the damage to Israel’s position has been done, too. It can’t be undone.
It doesn’t make any difference if ten innocents have been killed by Israeli fire or fifty or a thousand. It will be construed the same way regardless. The coverage of the Israeli-Hezbollah hostilities in the Arab media are all Israeli damage to innocent Arabs all the time, the grislier the better. That won’t be changed by revelations of doctored photos.
BTW, by this I don’t mean to suggest that the coverage is improper. It may be or may not be. I have no way to judge. But I think it’s eminently understandable: human interest, if it bleeds it leads.
Second, Reuters. The only way that Reuters or any other news organ is going to cover the hostilities in Lebanon is with stringers. And they’re going to use the most dramatic, affecting, effective pictures available. That means the stringers will be motivated to make their pictures as dramatic, affecting, and effective as possible either by skill at taking just the right shot or by staging or by digital enhancement. What else would you expect?
The idea that Reuters editors have either the skills or the inclination to pore over every picture as have the skilled Photoshop users in the Right Blogosphere is unrealistic, too. They have a lot to do and very little time in which to do it. What would you expect them to do? Prefer less dramatic pictures to more dramatic?
Third, professional journalism. This incident presents no smoking gun. All that we have here are stringers, editors, and others behaving just exactly as you’d expect. Nothing to see here. Move on.
Professional journalism is not going to be permanently discredited by this. The Reuters office is unlikely to become a target of Israeli airstrikes (remember “ink by the barrelâ€?). Blogs won’t replace newspapers.
For good or ill we’re stuck with the professional journalism we have. We can exhort them to do better and shame them when they fail. But, like it or not, they’re indispensible. They’re the salt. If the salt loses its savor with what shall it be salted?
But there is one very critical point of view you have not addressed: the media, and especially AP and Reuters (who feed virtually all Western news media with their raw material), are the Western civilians’ public intelligence system; that is how we find out about the world. If our world view is based on delusions caused by deliberately-manipulated reporting, then we will take wrong actions. This is true on security (don’t support Israel against the terrorists, for example), disaster preparedness (more below), or public policy (the real deficit is much, much higher than the reported deficit, for example).
Let’s take the Hurricane Katrina coverage as an example. I was very skeptical about early reports out of New Orleans: the number of bodies and depravity being reported were simply something I didn’t think could have happened given the described circumstances. Then there was a report, by the Times-Picayune I think, where the reporter described seeing bodies stacked in the freezer at the convention center. Suddenly it was no longer second- or third-hand stories: here was a reporter who had actually seen a large slice of what the second- or third-hand stories had described. That gave the news reports much greater credibility.
But guess what? It turns out that there were three bodies at the convention center. The reporter either misrepresented a story he was told as his own experience, or simply made up a story to get the byline. Most people see only the initial reports, or second-hand accounts of those; they seldom see the full story as the facts come out over time. (This is one way in which political bloggers are, simply, freaks: we watch the news over time and in context. This, of course, excludes the rabidly partisan of both Left and Right, whose views are so pre-fixed that they only see the news they care to see, anyway.) So most people seem to think both that the government could have done more to prevent damage from Katrina, and could have responded instantaneously to what did happen. Most people seem to think that it was the old levies, not the new ones, that collapsed, or that the levies were overtopped rather than collapsing. Most people seem to think that several thousand people died in New Orleans, and that the dead were disproportionately black.
None of those things are true. But by believing those things, political support shifts from what can be done to make the situation truly better (like total reform of the system of levies and the Corps of Engineers) and towards attacks on things that didn’t actually fail (FEMA’s response time was actually faster than FEMA tells local governments to expect). This results in less effective use of public funds to prevent another hurricane from doing the damage and causing the deaths that Katrina did cause. For that matter, such a skewed view prevents us from deciding that, perhaps, the money that we are spending to prevent such events from recurring might be better spent against a more common or more deadly threat.
Bad information leads to incorrect response.
And that is why it is important that this fakery be exposed as widely as possible. It is why Eason Jordan’s repetition of Ba’athist propaganda, previous faked war photos, Rathergate and other invented evidence, misleading reports (the Jenin “massacre” comes to mind), Jayson Blair and other utter fictions must be exposed as widely as possible. If we are to make good decisions on how to respond, and fundamentally for most of us how to vote, we must either have good information, or we must know how and how much our information is bad.
I haven’t ignored that, Jeff. I’m taking that into account. I think that blogs serve a valuable quis custodiet function WRT the professional media. Correct, exhort, shame, yes. Replace? Nonsense. It doesn’t take much reading of those who’ve jumped all over this story to see how far those doing so are overreaching. “Discreditâ€, “irrelevantâ€, “enemy propagandaâ€. That’s all just triumphalism. Not particularly constructive.
We go to war with the media we have.
Dave;
We disagree on the import of this.
We both know Hezbolah stands no chance at all of winning a military victory against Israel. None. The only way for them to win their objective is through propaganda. Consider a parallel situation;
Vietnam.
The North was weeks from folding, by the admission of their former commanders. They stodd no chance at winning. But win they did. How? What won the war there for them? Public opinion here at home, which was secured by years of propaganda about how the US was the oppoessor.
All the photos that were doctored came up looking like Israel’s attacks were far more serious and far less surgical than they were. The only way this could be helpful to anyone is as propaganda… showing Israel as the aggressor.
Same type of sitrep, same actions. Doesn’t take a genius to see tha the same result will occur.
I doubt that we disagree that much. I certainly don’t disagree that it’s been effective de facto propaganda. Whether Reuters is intentionally slanting the news or just looking for a better story I have no idea.
The harm’s already been done and can’t be undone. That’s a battle Israel has already lost.
I think the effects of the Right Blogosphere’s campaign are very, very limited. So you get one stringer. He’ll re-surface under another name. The very most that can be achieved is that everybody will know less about what’s actually happening. There will still be anti-Israeli propaganda. How will that help anything?
Get Reuters? Forget about it. The wire services are bureaucracies and have all the characteristics of the beast. Nobody’s accountable for anything.
The extent of my criticism is the triumphalism. I think it’s exaggerated.
The question you ask Reuters is intentionally slanting the news or just looking for a better story , is valid.. however, I think the better question to ask is, “was Hajj trying to slant the news?”
When asked in that light and in consideration of the groups this guy’s involved with, and spoken in front of, and his publicly held positions there seems only one answer… and the questions of
* why Reuters put up with it for so long.
* given the rather light security and fact checking on stories, what else has made it into the press from such people?
As for the what you call triumphalism, perhaps.
But where are the MSM people ont this stuff? Even those from competing news agencies did nothing about this. Only the bloggers questioned the validity of the photo. Between this and the Rather story, the pattern is becoming clearer, and so far as that goes, it seems to me bloggers are somewhat entitled to the laurels they’re claiming for themselves.
Granted, that there is danger in spending too much time in slapping one’s own back. But, I submit that the only difference betwen this situation and ‘nam is that alternative media…. Bloggers, in part…. are around this time.
As an aside, I wish they’d been around last time, too.
Perhaps Hajj was slanting the news, perhaps he was just trying to sell pictures. I have no basis for making that determination. What I tried to suggest in the post was since the incentives favor sensationalism, you’re going to get more sensationlism. There may be other motives but there don’t need to be other motives.
As to where the MSM is on this I suspect they consider this to be completely unsurprising for much the reasons that I’ve suggested: an interesting story rather than a dull one, harried editorial staff, etc.
Once again, my take is that:
1) the net effect is pro-Hezbollah propaganda
2) there’s nothing that can been done about that now
3) whether it’s deliberate or not is indeterminate
4) blogospheric auditing is a good thing
5) not much will come of it
Remember that the wire services are more protected than the news outlets themselves. You can punish on on-air personality, e.g. Dan Rather. The wire services are simply unaccountable and beyond reach.
A stringer doctored some photos – either to make them more valuable, or to propagandize. He was caught. Reuters will no longer use him. End of story.
Those who wish to condemn the entire MSM over this episode are really, really, really over-reaching. I’m with Dave – Calm down folks.