Jay Currie

The Zerb devotes her treeware column to Reutersgate today. She seems to have learned a little from the comments on her blog. Baby steps to be sure but she’s beginning to get it.

However, she manages to undermine her own point with this bit of loonieness:

Worse, this all but ensures that any and all images of civilian casualties or the blasting of infrastructure will be called into question – while the actual deaths and destruction won’t.
the zerb

The images will of course be questioned. As they should be. Just like the death counts.

What the Zerb neeeds to realize is that information from a warzone is inherently unreliable. So, while it may feel good to emote about a particular image of a poor, dead, baby we have to recognize that that image may or may not have anything to do with reality.

Moreover, devoid of context, it is impossible to know if this or that image has been staged, if the destruction was the direct or the indirect result of enemy action, if the photographer has sexed up the image with rather more able photoshopping, how the image was cropped and so on.

Plus, what the MSM does not report is the circumstance which gives rise to the image. For example: every image of dead Lebanese civilians needs to carry the rider that Hezbollah deliberately sites its rocket batteries in civilian areas in direct contravention of the Geneva Convention. And, each image should also note that the presence of armed Hezbollah is a direct violation of the UN resolution under which Israel left Lebanon. And there should be mention that Iran and Syria’s arming of Hezbollah is in direct breach of that resolution.

But no MSM organization is going to clutter up the emotion with a lot of fine print context. Which means that the public is left with stark, inaccurate, politically spun images and asked to “feel” something about them. Because provocative images, dead babies, are designed to bypass any rational analysis and go right to the heart. Which is what makes them so powerful.

Ultimately, the problem Reutergate exposes is not the fact that photographers and reporters “make stuff up”; rather it is the fact that the home office at Reuters or the New York Times or WaPo or CNN have caved to the culture of emotion rather than reason: they want the strong, hard hitting, image. “If it bleeds it leads.” is simplistic; but we have moved from the cool world of print to the hot world of image. Marshall Mcluhan would be amused and Neil Postman depressed.