August 11, 2006

• I know I have seen some discussions on the blue about this (for example), but havent seen any in MoFi, so forgive me for any doubley postage. Also, it's worth noting that Reuters has yanked the offended photo and is reviewing all its other photos.
• And bombs falling on innocent Lebanese and Israeli citizens were never a problem again.
• People on Little Green Footballs got really mad at me when I spoke in favor of a proposed sister-city organization in 2004. (If you scroll down to the bottom, you can read my response attempting to establish dialogue. Apparently the thread was closed immediately after.) But it was nothing compared to the fun phone call I got.
• Have we all seen the non-photoshopped version of that first pic in the video? Same smoke, just not as dark, and yet that flash video fails to show us that, instead implying the whole mass of smoke was fake. It's hard for me to take something seriously that starts of that disingenuously.
• Exploiting the Reuters incident
• The CSM just had an article on LGF. Glenn Greenwald was not pleased with it.
• As much as going to LGF is a real mind fuck, the damndest thing is that with the effect of the Killian document controversy and now the Reuters photos, it's easily the blog with the most influence in the real world.
• Um, how the photo with the plane fake or fraudulant? They didn't explain that one.
• I love the way the LGF guy uses a photo of an SUV with a couple of shells in the back seat as justification for the Isrealis killing any civillian vehicle on the road. Just a quick perusal of that site shows it to be full of half truths, fabrications, and outright lies. If the far right is getting their info from places like that it's no wonder that things are so screwed up.
• Sir Knickerbocker, for the same reason as the photo with the billowing smoke, the image contains 2 cloned versions of a single rocket (my guess). The other possibility is that all 3 are fakes, and he copy/pasted it 3 times. More info here
• OK, some hack photographer who can't use the clone tool worth damn gets outed. So? He's been fired. Perfect. It's not like he fabricated false reports over WofMD or babies thrown from incubators or heroic rescues of helpless POWs in Iraq... As for the zeal over the cropping and staging of the lebanese wreckage, I find the accusations quite overblown. Those loopies make it sound like the whole destruction in that country is nothing but a faked mirage.
• smoke scene used as smokescreen... would that i had the time available to some of the blogpool to obsess over photographs and indulge my paranoid fantasies about mainstream media manipulation in order to distract from the very real issues of mass civilian deaths and obliteration of infrastructure. i mean, they can't all be getting paid to do this stuff, can they?
• I agree with Mandyman. The topic of fraudulent coverage is an important one, but in this video, it's sacrificed in favor of scoring some partisan points. Nice Mark Twain quote though!
• Scartol I did not realize you lived in Madison as well. If you pursue anything else in regards to Lebanon or Palestine please contact me, I am in Madison as well. I am always at Michaelangelo's on state, or I DJ at Mickey's on Monday. or you can email me, and/or exchange numbers. As for the pictures, the exposure of five hoaxes does not rebuke the truth of 500 legitimate photos.
• Sorry to hear about your experience with the twin-city proposal, scartol. I poked around a bit on the twin-city website and LGF. I think your term "Journey into Madness" is a good one to describe the mentality at work in this situation. But there is a small hope in the end, isn't there? If we can understand the Madness then we can start to end it. (speaking as the "global we"). Understanding it, without going mad ourselves, that is.
• I didn't see this video as trying to downplay the actual violence going on in Lebanon. I saw it as pointing out some of the doctored photos coming out, along the lines of "don't trust everything you see." Certainly there are important things going on with the very real civilian deaths, but does that mean such staged/faked photos are suddenly unimportant? Should we be putting aside other issues and be concerned with a death count?
• Upon watching it a second time though, the message at the very end informing us that fakes like these are being made to encourage Israel to stop its attacks, that is certainly biased and probably untrue. More likely the photographers just wanted a good shot. I agree that the video would be much better and interesting if they cut out that last 10 seconds. Nevertheless, I do like that I am able to find out about these many faked photos, and how they are more common than I would have guessed. There is a dozen or so shown in there, and they all concern a series of events that have only been going on for roughly 3 weeks. So thats what, about 1 faked photo every 2 days for the past 24 days in some mainstream news source or another? Still fairly interesting.
• You're right, LoopyG, the post is definitely worthwhile. I tried to look for a non-partisan site that gives, say, a gallery of suspicious war photos. No luck. They all put partisan spin on it, in many cases worse than what was in the FPP video.
• Unfortunately this has been the platform of the extreme right for a while, and now a great deal of the left has adopted it as well. All arguments must be absolutely concise, if it isn't, due to this slippery slope, everything else you say is completely invalidated. So what these sites are attempting to do is invalidate all pictures from Lebanon, but debunking a few.