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and its corpse is getting the full Cromwell treatment

By streiff Posted in War — Comments (9) / Email this page » / Leave a comment »

By now you’ve heard of and read about the scandal surrounding photographs manipulated circulated by Reuters via its wireservice. The scandal is now mushrooming to include Newsweek, The New York Times and Associated Press (a hat tip to Richard North at EU Referendum, the Freepers, and Michelle Malkin among others for cataloging this nonsense). The fraud has become so pervasive that one regular actor, known as “the Green Helmet Guy,” now has his own blog.

Two instances of either staging or falsely captioning photos have appeared on our front page ( here | here)

What’s going on here?

Read on.

False stories in wartime are legion. We’ve discussed particulary noxious stories, like that by the Boston Globe which labeled photos from an internet porn site as that of American soldiers raping an Iraqi woman. But the fraud has reached a new plateau.

At Zombietime’s “Taxonomy of a Fraud” story, (while there be sure to take in the incomparable coverage of the 2006 World Naked Bike Ride and photos of the LoyalOpposition^™) several theories are proposed as to why Reuters and other news organizations have suddenly gone in the bag for Hezbollah. The answer appears to be several of these.

Theory A: The Reuters editorial staff is sympathetic to the aims of Hezbollah, and is using propagandistic images exaggerating Israeli violence to increase world pressure on Israel to stop its attacks, thereby giving Hezbollah a chance to regroup, and claim moral superiority.

Some sections of the media are clearly sympathetic to Hezbollah, if you read the reasons given by major papers for labeling al Qaeda as “terrorists” and not applying the same label to Hamas you can see how the same logic would affect their coverage of Hezbollah. For those who can remember, the PLO, PFLP, Red Brigades, Red Army Faction, the IRA, and a raft of others have all received favorable coverage by the news media.

If not politically sympathetic the bias of the news media in favor of the perceived “underdog” works to give the strong perception that the media have sided with Hezbollah.

Theory B: The stringers employed by Reuters are sympathetic to Hezbollah, and successfully duped the Reuters editors into publishing propaganda.

One of the major failings of the media in the Long War, thus far, is that they have become captives of their local stringers. While they chide the military for not having language proficient riflemen, it seems that most of the foreign bureaus of major papers are woefully deficient in providing languistically proficient reporters to their foreign bureaus. In Iraq, in particular, the stringers tend to be Sunni Arabs and their views have driven the media coverage of the war. What this dependence means is that the reporter cannot verify the information he has received from the stringer and the editor can’t question the information independently nor can the information be reliably fact checked. One CBS cameraman has been captured with Iraqi insurgents.

As an aside, one cannot help but note the absurdity of the news media relying upon the photography and reportage of local nationals whose loyalties may very well be with parties to the ongoing conflict and the reluctance of the media to allow reporters to be embedded with US troops because of a fear that the coverage will not be impartial.

Consequently, the journalists embedded in Iraq have suffered severe limitations on what they can and cannot report. As a guest of U.S. military, embedded journalists must abide by the rules or risk being sent home. These journalists, garbed in fatigues, covered in sweat and dirt report to us from behind tanks using a military vocabulary to describe their unit's mission as if they were the newest recruits.

"Correspondents in the field have bonded with troops to the point that their language and enunciated outlooks are often indistinguishable," says [columnist Norman] Solomon on the embedded journalists.

Chris Hedges, reporter for The Nation, feels that the embedded journalist's role has been solely to disseminate the "myth...the narrative we are fed about the war by the state...the myth used to justify the war and boost the morale of the soldiers and civilians." As a result, "these journalists become participants in the war effort," says Hedges.

Or as a retired admiral recently wrote, and comment upon by us here:

[T]he U.S. mainstream media (MSM) who send reporters to the combat zone do not like to have their people embedded with our troops. They claim that the reporters get "less objective" when they live with the soldiers and marines - they come to see the world through the eyes of the troops. As a consequence, a majority of the reporters stay in hotels in the "Green Zone" and send out native stringers to call in stories to them by cell phone which they later write up and file. No effort is made to verify any of these stories or the credibility of the stringers.

As a sidebar on the public affairs situation, Colonel Bob McRee, who was also on the panel and is bringing a Military Police Battalion to Iraq next month, invited the Colorado Springs Gazette to send a reporter with the battalion for six weeks to two months. He assured the Gazette, in writing one month ago, that he would provide full time body- guards for the reporter, taking the manpower out of his own hide. The Gazette has yet to respond to his offer.

Theory C: The stringers employed by Reuters simply wanted to make a name for themselves, and resorted to fraud to obtain the most spectacular images, regardless of their political outlook.

Yearning for fame and fortune are part of human nature so it would be surprising if some of that were not involved. When one considers the prospects of achieving fame by freelancing for a wire service, though, one is reminded of the joke about the blonde who tried to achieve stardom in Hollywood by sleeping with screenwriters.

Theory D: Reuters photographers and editors are intimidated by Hezbollah, and publish Hezbollah's propaganda out of fear for their lives.

There is no doubt that reporters in some areas of the world are placed at risk based on their reports. Reuters has admitted in the past to slanting their reporting based on the perceived danger of their staff. They are most notorious for their policy on “terrorism”

Stephen Jukes, the wire service's global head of news, explained his reasoning in an internal memo: "We all know that one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter and that Reuters upholds the principle that we do not use the word terrorist. . . . To be frank, it adds little to call the attack on the World Trade Center a terrorist attack."

CNN has admitted to giving slanted coverage to Saddam’s Iraq in return for being allowed to report from there and to guarantee the safety of their Iraqi employees.

Some may think this is noble, personally I think it is craven and dishonest beyond comprehension. We are better served having no coverage from an area than being the recipients of bald-faced propaganda.

But there is an even more troubling possibility in some cases. In some cases the serendipity is just too extreme to be plausible. Take the case of the ****canned Mr. Adnan Hajj. He is omnipresent. He is everywhere. He isn’t stopped by blown out bridges. He blithely ignores the warning by Israel that it will target all vehicle moving in south Lebanon. He’s fast. He’s gutsy. Or maybe he’s a Potemkin photographer who collects photos taken by Hezbollah members on the scene and passes the work to Reuters as his own.

This explanation also goes a long way towards explaining the infamous Haifa Street incident where an Iraqi stringer for AP just happened to be standing at the same spot where three Iraqi election workers were executed in cold blood by gunmen. There I ask:

While it is easy to understand a reporter accompanying an armed unit, of whatever allegiance, into combat, what kind of person would wait on a street corner, knowing a fellow human was to be butchered by a third party, and say nothing?

Perhaps I posed the wrong question. What if the photographer wasn’t there? What if the actual photographer was a member of the cell that carried out the killings and simply passed the photograph on to the AP stringer? Do they give back the Pulitzer?

So if Senator Hiram Johnson was right and “The first casualty when war comes, is truth," then we have reached a point where the truth is not only dead but it’s corpse is being publicly flayed.