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.

For those of us outside of the UK, the BBC News website has advertising on it. I inadvertantly clicked on one by mistake (because the Beeboids haven’t mastered html yet as rendered by Firefox), and got this link: http://www.loveearth.com/uk/tracking

As you can see, its a lovely website dealing with the cuddliest animals threatened by Human-caused Climate Change and sponsored by BBC Worldwide

So what do we have on the menu bar? “Saving Planet Earth” with the byline:

The BBC Wildlife Fund supports work protecting wildlife under threat around the world. The remit of the Fund is to support projects that are helping to protect endangered wildlife and biodiversity - animals, plants and the wild places they need. It also helps to protect and improve the natural habitats that wildlife and humans share.

Which leads me back to the BBC Trust who last year produced a report on the BBC’s news activities especially in regard to its reporting on environmental issues. On the BBC’s reluctance to report on dissenters of the supposed scientific consensus, the BBC Trust said:

But these dissenters (or even sceptics) will still be heard, as they should, because it is not the BBC’s role to close down this debate. They cannot be simply dismissed as ‘flat-earthers’ or ‘deniers’, who ’should not be given a platform’ by the BBC. Impartiality always requires a breadth of view: for as long as minority opinions are coherently and honestly expressed, the BBC must give them appropriate space. ‘Bias by elimination’ is even more offensive today than it was in 1926. The BBC has many public purposes of both ambition and merit – but joining campaigns to save the planet is not one of them. [my emphasis]

Well I’m sorry BBC Trust, but it appears still that the BBC News team and BBC Worldwide are not only joining those campaigns but actively soliciting funds for them. They’ll continue to flout the BBC Charter just as long as you keep giving a blind eye to their real acitivities.