“Fauxtography”

Julles Crittenden has an incisive, insightful piece in the BostonHerald about photo fakery, concluding,

Everyone in the news business gets taken for a ride sooner or later. It’s an occupational hazard. What is surprising is the scale of it in Lebanon. And what is tragic about this is, as a Boston Herald photo editor noted, editors everywhere can no longer trust the pictures from Lebanon. The public cannot know what is staged and what is real. They cannot know the true scope of the devastation that Hezbollah’s aggression against Israel and its cynical tactics have brought on the Lebanese people. The con artists have shafted themselves and their own people with their cheap tricks.

But it also indicates that Hezbollah and Palestinian movie-set directors are trapped by oldthink. They've been hosing the West with "fauxtography" for so long that they do not realize thatthe media environment has changed. As Jules points out, there are countless eyeballs examining the photos and video released by news media from the theater. Jules names a few blogs that exposed the Photoshopped fakery of Adnan Hajj's pic of Beirut being bombed.

Another example: the "the unluckiest multiple home owner in Beirut," a Beirut woman photographed wailing over "the wreckage of her apartment" on July 22. Then on Aug. 5 the same woman, in the same clothing, was photographed wailing at the destruction of her house in the suburbs of Beirut.

Michelle Malkin has a long, illustrated post led by an expose of the New York Times' run of this photo of a "dead bombing victim."



NYT's caption: "The mayor of Tyre said that in the worst-hit area, bodies were still buried under the rubble, and he appealed to the Israelis to allow government authorities to pull them out."

The only problem is that there is a whole series of photos showing this same man running around the area. Besides, he seems pretty clean to have been "buried under the rubble," doesn't he?

NPR ran the same photo on its web site with a more realistic and quite plausible caption - that the man had fallen down and was being helped up.

Jules Crittenden is correct: the Lebanese people are suffering enough and their plight doesn't even need such propagandistic exaggeration. These fraudulent audiovisuals increase our skepticism of all such reports. For my earlier post on this topic, see here.

Update: Today the NYT today ran a correction: "The man pictured, who had been seen in previous images appearing to assist with the rescue effort, was injured during that rescue effort, not during the initial attack, and was not killed." It took them 20 days, but better late than never, I suppose.