Filters, Effects, and Propaganda

Okay, so the right-wing blogosphere is going banana-shit over the fact that a Lebanese Reuters photographer has had his work, as a whole, withdrawn from publication, after finding some very obvious instances of Photoshop fraud.

Of course these media "oopsies" always mysteriously go in one political direction. Try finding a retracted story that mistakenly casts the current presidential administration or it's allies in a favorable light. None can be found. But I think editors and TV producers as much swayed by the soft-focus “humanitarian” angle as they are by their own partisan filter of news events.

Oh look - a sensitive NPR reporter was granted special access to a pediatric infirmary inside Lebanon! The story that ensues is very thoughtful and interesting and the listeners in Cambridge and Madison will pause in their driveways, with the engine still running on the Volvo, to wait for the poignant interview to conclude and the minor-chord acoustic guitar interlude that tells them, with Pavlovian timing, that they can go in the house.

What actually transpired, of course, was pure manipulation of the reporter by locals who understand the diffusion of propaganda through the media better than people who have actually gone to J-school. Whereas the slightest amount of spin from the Bushies, for example Rumsfeld, is regularly (and even accurately) decried as cynically slapping lipstick on a pig, an almost laughable gullibility comes into place when the propaganda comes flying from the other direction.

All it takes is a mother of a civilian casualty weeping away, and journalists shift into sympathetic humanist mode. They feel no need to ask officials why evacuations of a war zone weren’t made mandatory, and no compelling interest in interrogating the Hezbollah PR guy escort who carefully scripted the whole interview under the auspices of looking out for the reporters "security".

Kudos to inquisitive bloggers for once again doing the media's work for them – but the Reuters photographer is chump change in the propaganda war.