[antimedia] antimedia: The LA Times takes....

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Posted by antimedia:
The LA Times takes....
http://www.antimedia.us/posts/1155407242.shtml


   ....a [1]step in the right direction by publishing an editorial that
   urges the major news media to examine the Reutersgate controversy.
   Rather than on the front page, where it rightly belongs, the article
   is in the entertainment section, which I suppose gets read more in LA
   than in most American cities. Furthermore, it was published on
   Saturday, perhaps the least likely day for anyone to read it. It was
   published online, however, so perhaps it will get more play than it
   otherwise would have.
   The writer makes some interesting observations and closes with this.

     What the major news organizations ought to be doing is to make
     their own analysis of the images coming out of Lebanon and if, as
     seems more than likely, they find widespread malfeasance, some hard
     questions need to be asked about why it occurred. Some of it may
     stem from the urge every photographer feels to make a photo
     perfect. Some of it probably flows from a simple economic
     imperative â a freelancer who produces dramatic images gets picked
     up more and paid more. Moreover, the obscenely anti-Israeli tenor
     of most of the European and world press means there's an eager
     market for pictures of dead Lebanese babies.
     It's worth noting in this context that there is no similar flow of
     propagandistic images coming from the Israeli side of the border.
     That's because one side â the democratically elected government of
     Israel â views death as a tragedy and the other â the Iranian
     financed terrorist organization Hezbollah â sees it as an
     opportunity. In this case, turning their own dead children into
     material creates an opportunity to cloud the fact that every
     Lebanese casualty, tragic as he or she is, was killed or injured as
     an unavoidable consequence of Israel's pursuit of terrorists who
     use their own people as human shields. Every Israeli civilian
     killed or injured was the victim of a terrorist attack intended to
     harm civilians. That alone ought to wash away any blood-stained
     suggestion of moral equivalency.
     That brings us to the most troubling of the possible explanations
     for these fraudulent photos, which is that some of the
     photojournalists involved are either intimidated by or sympathetic
     to the Hezbollah terrorists. It's a possibility fraught with harsh
     implications, but it needs to be examined thoroughly and openly.
     Johnson and his colleagues have done the serious news media a
     service. Failure to follow up on it would be worse than churlish;
     it would be irresponsible.

   The media has shown no inclination to investigate themselves in the
   past. I don't see why they would show an interest in this either.

References

   1. http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/news/la-et-rutten12aug12,1,640725.column?coll=la-news-columns&ctrack=1&cset=true