Things I don’t understand ||

…something which should be subtitled “The corruption of photojournalism by terrorists and the culpability of Western media organizations”

The event which initiated the fauxtography blogstorm was an Israeli airstrike on a building in the southern Lebanese village of Qana on July 30, 2006, a couple weeks after the start of active hostilities between Hezbollah and Israel. While the Israelis contended that the building was a legitimate military target, since it housed Hezbollah missile launch crews, and that they had been unaware of the presence of noncombatants in the building, mainstream press outlets gave extensive coverage to civilians killed in the destruction of the building and accusations that Israel had committed a war crime. In a post on EU Referendum titled, “In Whose Interest?”,⁸ Richard North questioned the balance of BBC coverage of the incident, saying that it failed to adequately describe the Israeli military’s explanation for the air strike. While the post, as a whole, was a critique of the fairness of the BBC reporting, of particular interest here are North’s references to the visual images accompanying the reporting.

The whole essay is well worth a read, for it reveals the lengths to which Hezbollah in particular used photojournalism and Photoshop to create incidents which never happened or that were exaggerated or manipulated for propaganda effect, and the collusion, witting or unwitting, by Western news agencies in spreading that propaganda around the world.