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Part of me wants to say oh how unethical. However in the grand scheme of things there is a war, there are people dieing, buildings are being destroyed and things are catching on fire. So what if it doesn’t show THE tank or THE plane or THE specific fire. At the end of the day does it really matter?
I wondered how long it would take before someone made the “fake but accurate” argument. It was quicker than I expected…nice job, Rubyeyes, you get the prize!
Yes, unbelievable arrogance, if you ask me. Don’t worry about objective truth, because the ‘journalists’ know what the real truth is. They don’t have the facts to support their version of truth, but they figure a little manipulation won’t hurt because they are so sure they are right but just don’t have the evidence to back it up. Good thing our criminal justice system doesn’t work this way or DA’s would be able to convict by falsifying evidence.
“Kfar Chima, near Beirut, July 17, 2006 An Israeli Air Force F16 has alledgedly been shot down while bombing a group of Hezbollah owned trucks, at least one of these trucks contained a medium range ground to ground missile launcher.�
becomes
“The wreckage of a downed Israeli jet that was targeting Hizballah trucks billows smoke behind a Hizballah gunman in Kfar Chima, near Beirut. Jet fuel set the surrounding area ablaze.�
There is nothing misleading about the chosen caption although it is less descriptive than the photographers. The exclusion of the missile launcher is the only difference and could be due to editorial constraints on the amount of type that would fit as easily as for any other reason. Having not seen the Time article in magazine format I cannot be sure that is the case but having edited stories before I know that lonf captions are often required to be chopped down for due to space limitations.
I think unless some further evidence is presented, this is a non-story. If further evidence is available, however, there might be something more to it than the unsubstantiated claims presented by pundits.
The LGF post was written very poorly. I think the point is that it actually wasn’t a plane at all but a missle that fired. Following the link from the LGF post the key sentence is the revised caption:
Kfar Chima, near Beirut, July 17, 2006 The Israeli Air Force bombed a group of Hezbollah chartered trucks parked on the back of large Lebanese Army barracks , at least one of these trucks contained a medium range ground to ground missile launcher, at least one missile was hit, misfiring high into the sky before falling down and starting a huge fire in the barracks’ parking lot.
The “conspiracy” is that instead of saying it was a missle on a Lebanese Army base (proving collaboration between the government and Hezbollah) that was hit and caused the fire, they said it was a plane. At least that’s what I think the point is, it’s hard to tell.
Rudi,
The LGF piece links to another site (and I have no idea on the bias or lack therof of that site either) but it includes the photographer explaining what he witnessed, what he recorded on the images, and the captions he sent along with the images. The editors changed the captions to change the story.
well since there was a link in the post at LGF to the photographer’s post it seems you already had another source tho I don’t know you can say less biased but less partisan would be easy. What a cop out!!
How can you say changing the caption from being “alledgedly” shot down to “wreckage of a downed Israeli jet” as not being misleading when in fact it wasn’t “wreckage of a downed Israeli jet”. Say it wasn’t bias or whatever, but it was stupid and bad reporting by whoever changed the caption.
July 17, 2006 An Israeli Air Force F16 has alledgedly been shot down while bombing a group of Hezbollah owned trucks
That would of worked and is shorter than what they used. Clipping out the report of the missle as unconfirmed is fine, but writing as confirmed info that wasn’t so, and incorrect to boot?
One wonders how long it will be before advances in FX technology and news room pressures to cut costs in order to meet corporate bottom line objectives will finally intersect. Innumerable Science Fiction movies have foreshadowed it in not very reassuring ways.
It may only be a matter of time before it actually happens full blown in the real world.
That’s why I go to the extra effort of sifting through the internet to get my news rather than taking the easy way out of watching the evening news on television. I realize that it is no guarantee of getting fully accurate news either, but at least it gives me some control over the process. And having to work at it moves me out of the role of passive receiver of news.
And here I thought life was supposed to get easier as I got older. I guess I can scrap that myth.
Umm we’re in a war in Iraq based upon a whole lot of falsehoods and the guy who made the decision is still leader of the most powerful country in the world. The fact you want to debate whether this caption is 100% acurate amazes me. This has absolutely no bearing on anything. Yet people die everyday fighting supposed “terrorist” in Iraq when the administartion admits the mastermind for 9/11 is somewhere in Afghanistan/Pakistan. But for this moment in time you want to debate a caption on a photograph. That I find arrogant, that I find reprehensible, that I find totally mind boggling. Almost as if the media is all to blame for this.
So I ask who is this picture biased against? In my approximation it’s biased for the innocent people whose lives are disrupted by war every single day. A life many of you know absoultely nothing about – because “we’d rather fight terrorist over there” because the people over there don’t mean a damn thing to you. Who cares if it’s a rocket or a plane does it really make any difference to the people who are living there? How can it possible make a difference to you? “Those” people are not suffering any less because the caption for this photo is wrong.
So yeah it doesn’t matter to me. What matters to me is when I look at my kids I know there are kids the same age mine kids who can’t ride their bikes in the streets after school. Yeah that’s important to me – I guess it’s not so important to you.
So yeah it doesn’t matter to me. What matters to me is when I look at my kids I know there are kids the same age mine kids who can’t ride their bikes in the streets after school. Yeah that’s important to me – I guess it’s not so important to you.
Rubyeyes,
That is one of the most insulting pieces of BS that I’ve come across. Because we expect integrity in journalism and won’t excuse what is at best sloppiness and at worst, distortion, we don’t care about kids who die in war zones? What a crock. Why in the world would you assume that we don’t care about the kids, simply because we care whether or not the facts of the war are being accurately reported? And you seem to miss the fact that Israel is condemned almost daily for targeting civilians, and the UN passes numerous resolutions condemning their actions but never those of Hezbollah or Hamas. So yeah, I guess this doesn’t matter, what’s the diff if the altered caption completely misrepresented the situation into one where once again, Israel can be painted as the aggressor. Ho hum, no big deal.
When will we declare war on these media jihadists? When will we target Time Magazine, CNN, Fox News (oops, no, not them) with cruise missiles and finally fight this war as if we intended to win it?
Umm we’re in a war in Iraq based upon a whole lot of falsehoods and the guy who made the decision is still leader of the most powerful country in the world. The fact you want to debate whether this caption is 100% acurate amazes me.
What no one will address is that Israel is violating Lebanese airspace which is an act of war. From that Far Left site YnetNews: Ynet
The United Nations renewed a plea to Israel on Friday to stop violating Lebanese airspace with surveillance flights the Jewish state insists are needed to guard against arms smuggling from Syria .
The United Nations says such flights, conducted regularly by Israeli warplanes for years, are a clear violation of the ceasefire resolution adopted by the UN Security Council in August to end the 34-day Israel-Hizbullah war.
Israel,Iran and Syria are playing games with a soveriegn country – Lebanon – with all three being equally guilty of trying to undermine the only true Arab democracy.
No the Israelis are still flying over Lebanese airspace. From the Scotsman: Scotsman
The French Foreign Ministry said earlier on Friday that it hoped the United States, Israel’s closest ally, would put pressure on Israel to end the flights after French peacekeepers this week nearly launched missiles at Israeli jets flying in an attack mode over their outpost.
French peacekeepers in southern Lebanon came within seconds of firing at the Israeli planes on October 31, French Defence Minister Michele Alliot-Marie said on Wednesday. She had earlier warned that the flights were “extremely dangerous” and had to stop.
Israel has insisted it will continue the flights to help ensure that arms are not smuggled into southern Lebanon from Syria to resupply Hezbollah guerrillas, which also is a violation of the U.N. cease-fire resolution. There have been conflicting reports on whether such smuggling was taking place.
Of course the ceasefire resolution has been violated by Lebanon and Hizbollah since day one. Has the U.N. renewed any pleas to them?
How does saying that Israel was targeting Hizbollah trucks paint a bad picture of them? It’s exactly what they should have been doing in a conflict with them. I don’t see it as a negative thing.
Rubyeyes- I have to agree with CS on this one-if you deplore the blatant dishonesty coming out of our own government, you can’t condone it in the media either. We should never settle for less than the truth from either, since both are so important to our democracy. The sloppy reporting that now-disgraced Judith Miller used in her NYT’s articles on prewar intelligence, helped land us in a war that we now cannot win-this is just as bad.
its a trend that needs to stop, or we will no longer trust our government or the press to keep us safe.
Rudi are you kidding? Act of war by Israel?? But the missle attacks that came out of Lebanon were not? After everything that has happened do you really believe that Israel has no right to defend itself. The UN has a horrible track record so no one in their right mind would depend on them. The fact of what the picture really does show is more than reason for Israel to continue their efforts to protect themselves.
The cease fire is a joke, as most UN security resolutions are. Both sides are violating it (IMO Israel is forced to violate it in order to protect itself). Lebanon hides behind deniability with Hezbollah doing it’s dirty work. I think that Siniora may not want to do that but he is too weak to do otherwise.
CS so you want to go back to the war that Israel didn’t want to fight and ended as a stalemate. Stewart had a segment about the Orthodox Jews siding with the Islamists in Palestine over a Gay Rights parade in Jerusalem. Of course Gay Jews and Muslim Palestians aren’t allowed to marry by Israelis law…….
Over flights of the bombed out areas are not a defensive move. From Haaretz: Haaretz
Provocation in Lebanon’s skies
By Haaretz Editorial
In recent days, Israel Air Force aircraft have repeatedly flown over Beirut to signal Israel’s dissatisfaction with the diplomatic situation that emerged following the war and with the nonimplementation of United Nations Security Council Resolution 1701, which brought an end to the fighting after it was accepted by all sides. The assumption that a provocation of this sort over Lebanon’s airspace will somehow further Israel’s interests has been part of Israel’s security policy for years. Using supersonic booms as a menacing harassment has become part of the Israeli government’s operational arsenal: a sort of forceful message that is supposed to hint that Israel is capable of much more, but for now is making do with the minimum.
Having destroyed the Dahiya quarter in Beirut, it is doubtful that the air force needs to send Lebanon any further signals about its capabilities. The message has apparently been fully understood, but it is doubtful that it had brought about the desired results. It may have even achieved the opposite effect: strengthening Hezbollah as a political actor in Lebanon.
Rudi, You seem to get more things wrong than right. You pull in other arguments that have nothing to do with your point and then you get those things wrong as well. There is no law about who anyone in Israel can marry. There is a court ruling about denying citizenship to someone from the west bank (palestine) who marries an Israeli. Not that they can’t have citizenship but rather that the govt can deny it. The Jordan denies citizenship to the children of women married to palestinian men. The US has guidelines about citizenship for spouses, even Denmark and Holland have legislation limiting entry of spouses. But way to ignore the facts to further the cause!
Part of me wants to say oh how unethical. However in the grand scheme of things there is a war, there are people dieing, buildings are being destroyed and things are catching on fire. So what if it doesn’t show THE tank or THE plane or THE specific fire. At the end of the day does it really matter?
does it really matter?
to ask that question alone is highly unethical.
of course it matters.
journalism is about reporting what happens.
not about making some stuff up, no matter whether it is war or not.
reporting the truth and all that?
seriously, that you are even willing to ask that question is something that i find to be unbelievable.
I wondered how long it would take before someone made the “fake but accurate” argument. It was quicker than I expected…nice job, Rubyeyes, you get the prize!
CS: it truly is unbelievable, isn’t it? If people with those views are journalists… well… you get my drift.
Yes, unbelievable arrogance, if you ask me. Don’t worry about objective truth, because the ‘journalists’ know what the real truth is. They don’t have the facts to support their version of truth, but they figure a little manipulation won’t hurt because they are so sure they are right but just don’t have the evidence to back it up. Good thing our criminal justice system doesn’t work this way or DA’s would be able to convict by falsifying evidence.
Hmmm….
“Kfar Chima, near Beirut, July 17, 2006 An Israeli Air Force F16 has alledgedly been shot down while bombing a group of Hezbollah owned trucks, at least one of these trucks contained a medium range ground to ground missile launcher.�
becomes
“The wreckage of a downed Israeli jet that was targeting Hizballah trucks billows smoke behind a Hizballah gunman in Kfar Chima, near Beirut. Jet fuel set the surrounding area ablaze.�
There is nothing misleading about the chosen caption although it is less descriptive than the photographers. The exclusion of the missile launcher is the only difference and could be due to editorial constraints on the amount of type that would fit as easily as for any other reason. Having not seen the Time article in magazine format I cannot be sure that is the case but having edited stories before I know that lonf captions are often required to be chopped down for due to space limitations.
I think unless some further evidence is presented, this is a non-story. If further evidence is available, however, there might be something more to it than the unsubstantiated claims presented by pundits.
The LGF post was written very poorly. I think the point is that it actually wasn’t a plane at all but a missle that fired. Following the link from the LGF post the key sentence is the revised caption:
The “conspiracy” is that instead of saying it was a missle on a Lebanese Army base (proving collaboration between the government and Hezbollah) that was hit and caused the fire, they said it was a plane. At least that’s what I think the point is, it’s hard to tell.
A link to LittleGreenFootballs and objective are mutally exclusive. Find a less biesed source and then there can be a debate.
Rudi,
The LGF piece links to another site (and I have no idea on the bias or lack therof of that site either) but it includes the photographer explaining what he witnessed, what he recorded on the images, and the captions he sent along with the images. The editors changed the captions to change the story.
well since there was a link in the post at LGF to the photographer’s post it seems you already had another source tho I don’t know you can say less biased but less partisan would be easy. What a cop out!!
How can you say changing the caption from being “alledgedly” shot down to “wreckage of a downed Israeli jet” as not being misleading when in fact it wasn’t “wreckage of a downed Israeli jet”. Say it wasn’t bias or whatever, but it was stupid and bad reporting by whoever changed the caption.
That would of worked and is shorter than what they used. Clipping out the report of the missle as unconfirmed is fine, but writing as confirmed info that wasn’t so, and incorrect to boot?
beat me to it CS. By the way it’s a Photographer web site for people in the biz I guess.
One wonders how long it will be before advances in FX technology and news room pressures to cut costs in order to meet corporate bottom line objectives will finally intersect. Innumerable Science Fiction movies have foreshadowed it in not very reassuring ways.
It may only be a matter of time before it actually happens full blown in the real world.
That’s why I go to the extra effort of sifting through the internet to get my news rather than taking the easy way out of watching the evening news on television. I realize that it is no guarantee of getting fully accurate news either, but at least it gives me some control over the process. And having to work at it moves me out of the role of passive receiver of news.
And here I thought life was supposed to get easier as I got older. I guess I can scrap that myth.
Umm we’re in a war in Iraq based upon a whole lot of falsehoods and the guy who made the decision is still leader of the most powerful country in the world. The fact you want to debate whether this caption is 100% acurate amazes me. This has absolutely no bearing on anything. Yet people die everyday fighting supposed “terrorist” in Iraq when the administartion admits the mastermind for 9/11 is somewhere in Afghanistan/Pakistan. But for this moment in time you want to debate a caption on a photograph. That I find arrogant, that I find reprehensible, that I find totally mind boggling. Almost as if the media is all to blame for this.
So I ask who is this picture biased against? In my approximation it’s biased for the innocent people whose lives are disrupted by war every single day. A life many of you know absoultely nothing about – because “we’d rather fight terrorist over there” because the people over there don’t mean a damn thing to you. Who cares if it’s a rocket or a plane does it really make any difference to the people who are living there? How can it possible make a difference to you? “Those” people are not suffering any less because the caption for this photo is wrong.
So yeah it doesn’t matter to me. What matters to me is when I look at my kids I know there are kids the same age mine kids who can’t ride their bikes in the streets after school. Yeah that’s important to me – I guess it’s not so important to you.
Rubyeyes,
That is one of the most insulting pieces of BS that I’ve come across. Because we expect integrity in journalism and won’t excuse what is at best sloppiness and at worst, distortion, we don’t care about kids who die in war zones? What a crock. Why in the world would you assume that we don’t care about the kids, simply because we care whether or not the facts of the war are being accurately reported? And you seem to miss the fact that Israel is condemned almost daily for targeting civilians, and the UN passes numerous resolutions condemning their actions but never those of Hezbollah or Hamas. So yeah, I guess this doesn’t matter, what’s the diff if the altered caption completely misrepresented the situation into one where once again, Israel can be painted as the aggressor. Ho hum, no big deal.
Obviously the title of the post is correct.
The media are the enemy!
When will we declare war on these media jihadists? When will we target Time Magazine, CNN, Fox News (oops, no, not them) with cruise missiles and finally fight this war as if we intended to win it?
Rubyeyes
What C.Stanley said plus
Wrong country
What no one will address is that Israel is violating Lebanese airspace which is an act of war. From that Far Left site YnetNews:
Ynet
Israel,Iran and Syria are playing games with a soveriegn country – Lebanon – with all three being equally guilty of trying to undermine the only true Arab democracy.
Rudi this event happened in July before the UN resolution you mention.
No the Israelis are still flying over Lebanese airspace. From the Scotsman:
Scotsman
Of course the ceasefire resolution has been violated by Lebanon and Hizbollah since day one. Has the U.N. renewed any pleas to them?
How does saying that Israel was targeting Hizbollah trucks paint a bad picture of them? It’s exactly what they should have been doing in a conflict with them. I don’t see it as a negative thing.
Rubyeyes- I have to agree with CS on this one-if you deplore the blatant dishonesty coming out of our own government, you can’t condone it in the media either. We should never settle for less than the truth from either, since both are so important to our democracy. The sloppy reporting that now-disgraced Judith Miller used in her NYT’s articles on prewar intelligence, helped land us in a war that we now cannot win-this is just as bad.
its a trend that needs to stop, or we will no longer trust our government or the press to keep us safe.
Rudi are you kidding? Act of war by Israel?? But the missle attacks that came out of Lebanon were not? After everything that has happened do you really believe that Israel has no right to defend itself. The UN has a horrible track record so no one in their right mind would depend on them. The fact of what the picture really does show is more than reason for Israel to continue their efforts to protect themselves.
The cease fire is a joke, as most UN security resolutions are. Both sides are violating it (IMO Israel is forced to violate it in order to protect itself). Lebanon hides behind deniability with Hezbollah doing it’s dirty work. I think that Siniora may not want to do that but he is too weak to do otherwise.
CS so you want to go back to the war that Israel didn’t want to fight and ended as a stalemate. Stewart had a segment about the Orthodox Jews siding with the Islamists in Palestine over a Gay Rights parade in Jerusalem. Of course Gay Jews and Muslim Palestians aren’t allowed to marry by Israelis law…….
Over flights of the bombed out areas are not a defensive move. From Haaretz:
Haaretz
No, Rudi, I don’t want that but I think it is inevitable because of the UN’s impotence.
Rudi, You seem to get more things wrong than right. You pull in other arguments that have nothing to do with your point and then you get those things wrong as well. There is no law about who anyone in Israel can marry. There is a court ruling about denying citizenship to someone from the west bank (palestine) who marries an Israeli. Not that they can’t have citizenship but rather that the govt can deny it. The Jordan denies citizenship to the children of women married to palestinian men. The US has guidelines about citizenship for spouses, even Denmark and Holland have legislation limiting entry of spouses. But way to ignore the facts to further the cause!