Summary
We hope doubters of media bias are paying attention to the photojournalism follies in Lebanon this week. It started with a Reuters freelance photographer's doctoring of images to exaggerate plumes of smoke and Israeli-wrought destruction in Beirut. The photographer was fired, which would have ended the matter, except that fresh irregularities at the New York Times, the Associated Press and U.S. News & World Report are emerging. As we said about the Reuters incident, media bias is a consensus, not a conspiracy. Consensus is what this apparent rash of unprofessional photography appears to be, which should remind U.S. policy-makers that active public diplomacy is indispensable as long as there are journalists who find war stories too good to check.
These new instances appear to be shoddy journalism, not propagandizing, and so their bias is inadvertent but nevertheless revealing. For instance, it turns out that a riveting New York Times photo of a Lebanese man being rescued from the rubble of a destroyed building in Tyre wasn't what it appeared to be. The original caption: "The mayor of Tyre said that in the worst-hit areas, bodies were still buried under the rubble, and he appealed to the Israelis to allow government authorities time to pull them out." So, presumably the photograph depicts the rescue of one victim.See the full content of this document
Extract
Framing the Story
But bloggers noticed that the would-be rescuee body dust-free, hat tucked under his arm had been ph...
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