Allah Pundit Gets Cranky
And spanks heck out of Greg Mitchell, the editor of Editor and Publisher for his "defense" of photojournalists. Which isn't a defense at all but rather an attempt to attack us uppity bloggers.
Well, Greg Mitchell wasn’t about to let that stand unanswered. He responded yesterday with a rousing defense of photojournalists in the Middle East, which isn’t a defense at all but an attack on those of us who’ve suddenly made it harder for people in his industry to pass off crap as genuine news. The tone is set right away: photojournalists, says Mitchell, “are risking their lives while bloggers risk nothing but carpal tunnel syndrome.”
That’s a chickenhawk reference, in case you weren’t sure which team he’s on.
Now the meat of it. All emphases mine:
[O]ne American photographer in Lebanon, Bryan Denton, often cited by the blogs as backing their claims, has now apologized for his earlier “irresponsible” assertions at the Lightstalkers site, and stated flatly, “Any one out there who is trying to politicize that is just plain sick, and is moving this further away from the real issue at hand. There are hundreds of photographers working here now. Don’t let a few bad apples take the attention away from what the REAL story is, because by the looks of the blogs, THAT is exactly what is happening.” Don’t expect to find those second thoughts on any of the blogs.
At no point does Mitchell actually describe what Denton alleged — namely, that while in Lebanon he personally witnessed “one case where a group of wire photogs were choreographing the unearthing of bodies, directing emergency workers here and there, asking them to position bodies just so, even remove bodies that have already been put in graves so that they can photograph them in peoples arms.”
Nor does he mention that later in the same thread Denton repeated the allegation and asserted that he’d heard from friends in Lebanon that it wasn’t an isolated incident. To read Mitchell, you would think that Denton had “apologized” and retracted his accusation. Nothing of the sort. Here’s what Denton actually said:
again, i am terribly sorry for rattling the saber so hard….re-reading my words I too should have been a bit more responsible.
He was sorry that his accusation had caused so much commotion. He wasn’t suggesting that what he said was untrue. On the contrary.
Who knows, though? Maybe Mitchell’s planning to explain all this in part two.
Mitchell is wrong here. As his post points out right at the beginning, David Perlmutter's op-ed (from E&P, ironically) is a much more accurate reflection on the state of photojournalism today. He's also fighting out of his league trying to go up against the deity of photoshopping. (Incidentally, David Perlmutter himself commented in the comments of my post and recommends a couple of excellent books on the subject.)
Blogosphere, Media | Gaius Wednesday, 23 August , 2006
Other Links to this Post
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justbarkingmad.com » Blog Archive » E&P: You don’t DESERVE the truth! — Wednesday, 23 August , 2006 @ 5:38 pm
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Blue Crab Boulevard » Blog Archive » Epilogue — Friday, 25 August , 2006 @ 7:33 pm
By Quilly Mammoth, Wednesday, 23 August , 2006 @ 3:32 pm
So all this harping on, you know, the media actually TELLING THE TRUTH is getting in the way of the real story! Fake but accurate and the blogosphere is interferring again.
Sheesh.
By Gaius, Wednesday, 23 August , 2006 @ 3:38 pm
Yeah, it’s so unfair of the public to demand actual truth instead of media approved truthiness.
By David Paulin, Thursday, 24 August , 2006 @ 2:06 am
Greg Mitchell gets wackier by the day. Obviously he appeals to his audience — Bush-hating newspapermen who predominate in newspaper journalism. Some in the MSM, on the other hand, may be catching onto Mitchell, something that was underscored a few weeks ago when a prominent newspaper editor in Colorado pronounced him “irrelevant.”
Too bad that Mitchell doesn’t realize that’s he’s living in another era. In a way, he symbolizes all that is wrong with the senior agenda-driven editors and journalists in the MSM who came of age during Watergate and the Vietnam War. I wonder if he still pecks away at an old-fashioned typewriter.