Don't Trust If They Won't Verify
Contributed by Bill Faith
Thanks to our own John Werntz for the reminder, in the comments on the latest "Bark Back At Us" that OWD shouldn't let this pass unmentioned. Don't Trust If They Won't Verify
By Glenn Harlan Reynolds
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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[Read on here.]
John's comment: As the last Dog outabed today, I'm confident everyone has already seen the scathing article by Glenn Reynolds entitled "Don't Trust if They Won't Verify" that appeared in today's TCSDAILY.
All the same, I feel that each and every one of us has a condign moral obligation to write to the editor of his local daily and point out two stark facts:
- AP and Reuters are Hezbollah whores.
- By giving prominence to their feed, he is pimping for them.
Scranton Times-Tribune, here I come...
See also: Fauxtography follies illustrated
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