Little Green Footballs

Wednesday, August 02, 2006

Shooting down the revisionists

It seems the big bad 'MSM' isn't too pleased that certain websites have been peddling conspiracy theories, half-truths and downright lies about the Qana tragedy. They've come out fighting.

Three news agencies on Tuesday rejected challenges to the veracity of photographs of bodies taken in the aftermath of an Israeli airstrike in Lebanon, strongly denying that the images were staged.

Photographers from The Associated Press, Reuters and Agence France-Presse all covered rescue operations Sunday in Qana, where 56 Lebanese were killed. Many of their photos depicted rescue workers carrying dead children.

[...]

For example, the Web site draws attention to a photo by AP's Lefteris Pitarakis time stamped 7:21 a.m., showing a dead girl in an ambulance. Another picture, stamped 10:25 a.m. and taken by AP's Mohammed Zaatari, shows the same girl being loaded onto the ambulance. In a third, by AP photographer Nasser Nasser and stamped 10:44 a.m., a rescue worker carries the girl with no ambulance nearby.

The site suggests these events were staged for effect, a criticism echoed by talk show host Rush Limbaugh when he directed listeners to the blog on Monday.

"These photographers are obviously willing to participate in propaganda," Limbaugh said. "They know exactly what's being done, all these photos, bringing the bodies out of the rubble, posing them for the cameras, it's all staged. Every bit of it is staged and the still photographers know it."

The AP said information from its photo editors showed the events were not staged, and that the time stamps could be misleading for several reasons, including that web sites can use such stamps to show when pictures are posted, not taken. An AFP executive said he was stunned to be questioned about it. Reuters, in a statement, said it categorically rejects any such suggestion.

"It's hard to imagine how someone sitting in an air-conditioned office or broadcast studio many thousands of miles from the scene can decide what occurred on the ground with any degree of accuracy," said Kathleen Carroll, AP's senior vice president and executive editor.
Source: Yahoo! News

1 comment:

J.C. said...

The first casualty of war is the truth. Our media is controled and manipulated by the corporations. Even the so called alternative media is mostly given their little spaces because they are screened and shown to be really representing just another aspect of the current template. The so called alternative media never gets at the root problem. The root problem is that we live in a society where war is rewarded by making money. A lot of money is being made in this so called war by lots of different paper pushers. Of course we also want to shove our belief systems down other belief system believers throats. ----- There is not a political solution to this problem. No real socalled Democracy has existed in the U.S. since the late 1940`s . The problem is with the type of society we live in. Moralizing and preaching will change nothing. We have to get at the core of the problem. The problem stems from our Price System . You can get any one to do any thing if you pay them enough money. We do not need to have a system like this any more. Technocracy advocates switching to an energy debit system. this you would recieve as a right of citizenship. If we change the template of our society we change the Rules of the Game. Then the players act differently. If the reward for war is so great we will continue. If we get rid of the reward it won`t be done for the reason it is done now,, to make money.