Wireservices Deny Staging Photos
AP, AFP and Reuters are all denying participating in staging photos from Qana. The protests are quite vehement.
Photographers from The Associated Press, Reuters and Agence France-Presse all covered rescue operations Sunday in Qana, where 56 Lebanese were killed. Many of their photos depicted rescue workers carrying dead children.
A British Web site, the EU Referendum blog, built an argument that chicanery may have been involved by citing time stamps that went with captions of the photographs.
For example, the Web site draws attention to a photo by AP's Lefteris Pitarakis time stamped 7:21 a.m., showing a dead girl in an ambulance. Another picture, stamped 10:25 a.m. and taken by AP's Mohammed Zaatari, shows the same girl being loaded onto the ambulance. In a third, by AP photographer Nasser Nasser and stamped 10:44 a.m., a rescue worker carries the girl with no ambulance nearby.
The site suggests these events were staged for effect, a criticism echoed by talk show host Rush Limbaugh when he directed listeners to the blog on Monday.
"These photographers are obviously willing to participate in propaganda," Limbaugh said. "They know exactly what's being done, all these photos, bringing the bodies out of the rubble, posing them for the cameras, it's all staged. Every bit of it is staged and the still photographers know it."
The AP said information from its photo editors showed the events were not staged, and that the time stamps could be misleading for several reasons, including that web sites can use such stamps to show when pictures are posted, not taken. An AFP executive said he was stunned to be questioned about it. Reuters, in a statement, said it categorically rejects any such suggestion.
"It's hard to imagine how someone sitting in an air-conditioned office or broadcast studio many thousands of miles from the scene can decide what occurred on the ground with any degree of accuracy," said Kathleen Carroll, AP's senior vice president and executive editor.
Carroll said in addition to personally speaking with photo editors, "I also know from 30 years of experience in this business that you can't get competitive journalists to participate in the kind of (staging) experience that is being described."
Photographers are experienced in recognizing when someone is trying to stage something for their benefit, she said.
Ok, let's say the timestamp issue is explained away – that seems a reasonable explanation. Perhaps the wire services and the experienced photo editors could explain the complete absence of concrete dust on bodies supposedly killed in the collapse of a concrete building? Or the decade-long participation of the man in the helmet in photo opportunities from Qana? Oh and the sudden drop in number of dead bodies from 50+ to 28 would also bear a bit of explaining.
We'll wait.
UPDATE: EU Referendum didn't wait long to put together a sequence which renders the vehement protests somewhat, let's be charitable, questionable. This is pretty damning, I think. The progression of pictures makes no sense unless they are staged. None at all.
UPDATE: Well, I'm not close to being the only one who thinks the wireservices are less than forthcoming on this particular topic. Volokh Conspiracy, LGF, Israel Matzov. One thing here. This is not a conspiracy theory, which is the newest lefty campaign meme. Anyone who could look at the photos that EU Referendum has put together and not seriously question what exactly is going on is either blind, a fool or a partisan. There is something wrong here, folks. Bad, ugly wrong. This is not trying to deny the laws of physics, al la Kevin Barrett. This is very questionable material.
By Mike's America, August 1, 2006 @ 11:36 pm
And yet none of these so-called “news” organizations asked one question about the bodies in Qana. They put out the claim that there were up to 60 killed, and yet where are the bodies? The Red Cross reported 28 dead.
And who is that man in the green helmet who just happens to show up on the scene of every bombing??? You’d think one of these oh-so proud photographers would ask his name.
And it took how many hours for “news” people to get to the scene? Did the Hezboos have plenty of time to remove dead fighters and evidence of rocket launchers?
Did any of these “news” people ask the Hezboos if they understood that putting weapons in civilian neighborhoods is a war crime according to the Geneva Conventions?
What happened at Qana is a tragedy. And just as big a tragedy is the truth of what happened.