Sunday, August 20, 2006

manufacturing the news

aug 20, 2006

anyone remember the fuss made about 'jeningrad', which turned out to be a hoax?

also, wonder why every paper in india wept copious crocodile tears over qana, but none over the 61 schoolgirls killed in sri lanka or the 27 tribals murdered by marxists in errapore?

the media is prostituting itself.

Don't Trust If They Won't Verify
Author: Glenn Harlan Reynolds

Publication: TCS Daily

Date: August 15, 2006

URL: http://www.tcsdaily.com/article.aspx?id=081506C



Once again, fake news is in the news, as it turns out that many moving
stories of carnage in Lebanon were not only moving, but, well, fake.
This raises major questions about the future of the news business, and
offers a significant threat to free expression. As Tim Rutten observed
in the Los Angeles Times:



Many, including grisly images from the Qana tragedy, clearly are posed
for maximum dramatic effect. There is an entire series of photos of
children's stuffed toys poised atop mounds of rubble. All are
miraculously pristinely clean and apparently untouched by the
devastation they purportedly survived. (Reuters might want to check its
freelancers' expenses for unexplained Toys R Us purchases.) In some
cases, the bloggers seem to have uncovered the same photographer using
more than one identity. There's an improbable photo by Hajj of a Koran
burning atop the rubble of a building supposedly destroyed by an Israeli
aircraft hours before. Nothing else in sight is alight. (With photos, as
in life, when something seems too perfect to be true, it's almost always
because it is.) In other photos, the same wrecked building is portrayed
multiple times with the same older woman -- one supposes she ought to be
called a model -- either lamenting its destruction or passing by in
different costumes. . . .

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