The editors and the viral power of a lying image

There’s an expression we all know: that a picture is worth a thousand words. The problem is very few people have the patience to read or listen to the thousand words. And those with the motivation and agenda to drive their message forwards via pictures are very often able to get away with tremendous distortions of reality.

Frimet/Arnold Roth..
This Ongoing War..
09 March '13..

For most people, much of what is reported as news is confusing unless simplified and accompanied by illustrations.

News of the Arab/Israel conflict - so often beset with conflicting versions of reality - is especially confusing for many reasons, including the fact that many of the people reporting it have only the most tenuous grasp on the history of the protagonists or of the languages in which the events happen and in which each side tells its own story to its own people.

There’s an expression we all know: that a picture is worth a thousand words. The problem is very few people have the patience to read or listen to the thousand words. And those with the motivation and agenda to drive their message forwards via pictures are very often able to get away with tremendous distortions of reality. In a fast moving, competitive news industry, far too few editors do what we expect them to do – check the imagery and validate the reality that it seems to be representing before showing it to their audiences.

The thousand words represented by the picture too often turn out to be a thousand malicious, distorting, lying words.

In this post, we have pasted numerous versions of a powerful, painful image from November 2012. It shows a man called Jihad Masharawi who works for the BBC in its Arabic department. He is holding a child – sometimes wrapped up in a white shroud, sometimes in other poses. There are many photos of Jihad on the web from that month. His face displays the grief of a father. A shooting war is going on in the background. Thousands of rockets have been fired by the terrorist forces of the Gaza Strip at Israelis. The terrorists never claimed to be firing them either at the Israeli army or at strategic Israeli sites like power stations or roads. They were being fired wherever Israelis could be found and hit, and damn the consequences (our words, not theirs).

(Continue)

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