Pictures worth a thousand lives
Power Line
Thanks to our friends at the Claremont Institute and the Claremont Review of Books for affording us the privilege of rolling out a few of my favorite pieces from the new issue. As I have attempted to deepen my understanding of American politics and history, no periodical has proved more valuable to me than the CRB. It also has fans in the White House; thirty copies of each new issue are sent out upon publication. Subscriptions to the CRB are only $14.95 a year; subscribe here.
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The Winter 2005/2006 issue is now in the mail. Today we debut the first of three reviews from the new issue. We will continue to preview the current issue with links to reviews on Monday and Tuesday as well.
The disproportion between the obsessive media coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and its actual magnitude is, some say, one of the mysteries of our time. How is it, after all, that the world is so intimately familiar with this relative skirmish, when wars with 10, 50, even 1000 times the number of casualties -- think Chechnya, Sudan, and Congo -- are ignored? Why does Israel seem perpetually at the center of a world media storm? And why, for some time, was it losing?
Joseph Tartakovsky considers these questions in his review of Stephanie Gutmann's The Other War: Israelis, Palestinians and the Struggle for Media Supremacy. Tartakovsky's review is "Pictures worth a thousand lives."
Summarizing Gutmann, Tartakovsky notes that Israel faces three disadvantages in the media war that accompanies the shooting war. Israel's first disadvantage is the fact that Israel is an open society. This disadvantage is compounded by the control exerted over the media in Arab territory:
<<< If freedom is disadvantageous, this goes double when you happen to abut a shameless, propagandizing Arab dictatorship. Those famous scenes of Palestinian boys with rocks confronting soldiers, for example, are usually choreographed. Palestinian youths, exhorted by parents, teachers, and their televisions to pelt Israeli soldiers, are so conscious of the media presence themselves that they often don't start in with the stones until photographers arrive. Israeli soldiers are actually forewarned of clashes when film crews suddenly materialize. (Coalition forces have experienced the same phenomenon in Iraq.)
How do these reporters or photographers, on a quest for dramatic stories and footage, know where the "spontaneous" violence is to "erupt"? One or another foot soldier in their "small army of Palestinian fixers" is tipped off by the attackers. The Associated Press, Reuters, and Agence France-Press (which together supply 80% of news images to the world media) require the assistance of natives who speak the local language, know who's who, and can get things done. These hired locals, in turn, make decisions about where to drive and what to translate (or leave un-translated). >>>
Consider a case in point that we ourselves covered here. Last April one of the Pulitzer Prize journalism awards went to an AP stringer for his photo of terrorists murdering Iraqi election workers on Haifa Street in broad daylight. We carried the analysis by former New York Times White House photographer D. Gorton of the AP's award-winning Haifa Street assassination photo in "Murder on Haifa Street: An update." Mr. Gorton subsequently recapitulated his thoughts in a brilliant column for the Daily Standard: "Murder on Haifa Street." Here was Mr. Gorton's conclusion:
<<< So this is where the story stands now: A photo "stringer" who is identified as an Iraqi national, who remains anonymous, makes an exclusive picture that is not corroborated by any other photographic news source. The image fits into a press meta narrative about the situation in Iraq prior to crucial national elections. The published photo sets up an immediate outcry in the blogosphere and is met by an institutional defense by the AP. That is followed by a series of misstatements by the AP on the distance the photographer was from the scene, culminating in a piece by AP's director of photography, who avoids addressing that very issue of proximity.
Whatever the truth is, it may eventually come out. The terrorists know whether or not they were complicit with the photographer. As the insurgency winds down they may broker their way into an amnesty in which, no doubt, many tales will emerge--tales that could confirm the worst suspicions of complicity in murder.
In the meantime the AP is left with almost no reasonable defense of the photographer's actions, uncorroborated as they are. They can release all of the photographer's pictures of that day. They can even produce the photographer. But it's difficult to see what they could do to assure their integrity in this matter. >>>
And that is where the story stands today.
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