One Side Views Death As A Tragedy

Hezbollah sees it as on opportunity. Tim Rutten takes a look at the staged and falsified pictures spewing in a torrent from Lebanon. Enough legitimate questions have been raised, enough phony pictures identified to warrant a very hard look by the wire services and newspapers that have been using them. But it seems they are not really interested in doing so. 

There are, however, two problems here, and they're the reason this controversy shouldn't be allowed to sputter to its inglorious conclusion just yet: One of these has to do with the scope of what strongly appears to be wider fabrication in the photojournalism Reuters and other news agencies are obtaining from their freelancers in Lebanon. The other is the U.S. news media's grudging response to the revelation of Hajj's misconduct and its utter lack of interest in exploring whether his is a unique or representative case.

Thus far, only a handful of relatively brief stories on this affair have appeared in major American papers. The Times picked up one from the Washington Post, which focused mainly on the politics of Johnson's website. The New York Times, which ran one of Hajj's photos on its front page Saturday, reported that it has published eight of his pictures since 2003, but none were altered. It then went on to quote other papers about steps they take to detect fraudulent images. No paper has taken up the challenge of determining whether there's anything dodgy about the flow of freelance photos Reuters and other news agencies — including the Associated Press, which also transmitted images made by Hajj — are sending out of tormented Lebanon.

Read the whole thing, it is completely devastating to the media. The sickness of moral relativism makes wire services like the AP assign a reporter to defend a man caught, most literally, red-handed manipulating dead children for maximum photo impact. But not to worry, it is only a cultural thing the AP assures us. Why it is not one bit different than taking in dinner and a movie. All part of the normal way of things. Displaying the dead as a form of entertainment, we should just accept it and move on. Nothing to see here.

If the Western left and the media genuinely wants to stop the killing of civilians, they must begin denouncing Hezbollah's tactics of using human shields at every opportunity. They must stop buying pictures of dead civilians staged for maximum drama. They must stop calling all casualties on the Lebanese side "civilians" while calling all civilian casualties on Israel's side "Israelis". (Nasty trick that one).

They must stop the double standard. Or this will get ever so much worse.

UPDATE: Bruce Kesler at Democracy Project.

Other Links to this Post

1. Flopping Aces » Blog Archive » The Continuing Proof Of The Bias In The MSM — Sunday, 13 August , 2006 @ 1:05 am