Little Green Moment In The Sun

Hated, reviled and vilified by the left and especially by CAIR, Charles Johnson and his site, Little Green Footballs, is getting some serious positive press these last couple of days. Good for him. The latest comes from Brendan Bernhard writing in LA Weekly. It happens to be a monumental takedown of Reuters and the rest of the MSM coverage of the war in Lebanon as well.

Contacted by phone in Los Angeles, Johnson says he would like to see Reuters become more accountable in cases like this, but doubts that it will happen. “They’ve fired the guy [Hajj], but it goes beyond him, and people are starting to go over all those photos from Lebanon with a fine-tooth comb. It’s not always a question of fakery but also of propaganda, manipulation, whatever you want to call it.

“The issue is, if they’re using local stringers for reporting from these areas, they have to take more care that they’re reputable and not connected to groups like Hezbollah. I’m not saying they are connected, but Hezbollah has a media-relations department, they know very well what the power of the media is, and I’m not confident that news agencies like Reuters are ensuring it doesn’t happen. I think this scandal proves it doesn’t happen adequately… I really believe that Hezbollah is managing a lot of the stuff that’s coming out of Lebanon.”

The real thrust of Johnson’s critique, in other words, is to raise the delicate question of who exactly we are entrusting our “news gathering” to. Johnson and other bloggers have been criticized for claiming that the deaths of 28 civilians following an Israeli bombing of a house in the Lebanese village of Qana were deliberately staged by Hezbollah. But photos by the ubiquitous Hajj played a prominent role in the coverage, as Reuters has conceded. Bloggers claim many of them look, if not staged, then extremely posed. Particularly notorious was the number of photographs featuring a mysterious, green-helmeted Lebanese aid worker who, among other duties, seemed willing to hold up dead babies for hours on end for anyone with a working camera.

Johnson disputes the notion that he has tried to pretend no one died in Qana or that the death of children isn’t unequivocally horrifying. “None of the points I was making were intended to minimize the deaths in Qana, which did happen,” he says. “But because images like that have such a powerful hold over human nature — they invoke the strongest emotions we have, to see children dead — if someone is manipulating those effects for propaganda purposes, it’s vital they be exposed, because it’s loathsome. But yes, no one wants the children to be dead, and I don’t minimize that at all. But to dance on their corpses in this ghoulish propaganda display is almost worse.”

Dancing on corpses? Ghoulish propaganda display? A leaked interoffice memo from the Associated Press, or AP, congratulating its Qana photographers on “a stunning series of images . . . that beat the competition and scored huge play overnight,” suggests that such phrases, as well as some of Johnson’s other charges, may not be entirely hyperbolic.

“Nasser’s most haunting image,” reads one section of the memo, referring to a picture by AP photographer Nasser Nasser, “showed a man emerging from the rubble carrying the lifeless and dust-covered body of a child. Calm, morning light shone down on man and child, highlighting them against an almost monochrome background of pure rubble.” Monochrome background. Calm, morning light. Pure rubble (as opposed to that hideous rubbly kind of rubble). How nice. How poetic. How aesthetic. AP sounds less like a news organization than an ad agency.

In exposing Hajj’s manipulations, Johnson has raised the lid on a potential Pandora’s box. Namely, how our leading news agencies and newspapers increasingly rely on stringers from hostile nations to tell us how we, or our allies, behave in wartime. Since you’d be hard-pressed to find Muslims in the U.S., let alone Europe, who aren’t strongly anti-Israel and opposed to any American presence in the Middle East whatsoever, why on earth would you expect to find neutral Arab reporters in Baghdad or Beirut? This is the kind of question newspaper editors should be asking themselves (and their stringers). If the implications of this are followed through, or if more photographers like Adnan “Photoshop” Hajj are discovered, the ramifications are likely to be significant. In helping bring Hajj’s smoke-and-mirrors game to light, Johnson has performed a great service.

There's quite a lot more read it all. Let me raise an additional point I have not seen raised before. I worked for many years as a photographer. That was strictly a sideline job, but I was good enough at it to be continuously hired for jobs. (The income from that was a huge help at one of my financial low points, too). I was not a freelance news photographer per se, but a number of my pictures were published in a couple of publications. I took literally thousands and thousands of pictures, averaging at least five 36-exposure rolls of 35mm film per assignment. Only a very few (I am not bagging here) were not useful from any given shoot. Most were workmanlike at worst, good to very good at best.

But. Only a few pictures in all the years I did this work would be considered really great. Now, I'll grant that a "pro" might be considerably better than I am with a camera (there are a lot of my shots under the "because I Felt Like It" category - you can judge) and the percentage might well be higher. However, one might reasonably question a photographer who gets one after another after another iconic photographs in a very short span of time.

Ansel Adams iconic body of work took decades to make. Not two or three weeks. One can ask the question.

Other Links to this Post

1. Blue Crab Boulevard » Blog Archive » At What Point? — Saturday, 12 August , 2006 @ 8:55 pm