Some people have alleged that the building was not, in fact, destroyed by an Israeli attack, and that Hezbollah actually detonated the building itself (hours after an Israeli attack on the site) and planted bodies from a morgue to make it appear like a tragic scene. See, for example, here.

Setting aside the fact that I don't remember Prof. Bernstein calling for the firing of the journalists who participated in the Jessica Lynch sham, and other PR moments of that type, I note this post seems to be curiously silent on the topic of the broader conspiracy theory. Is the allegation that the photos were staged but the attack actually happened, or is the reality of the attack itself in question?

So as scores of people are being slaughtered or injured (in both sides of this mess) this strikes you as the most blogworthy issue of the day?

This petty scorekeeping is sickening.

'Journalism' is the production of interesting filler to keep people hanging around for the ads. The best filler is the cheapest and most interesting, which is why fact-checking is not done; it costs money, adds nothing to an item's entertainment value and may result in the item's having to be discarded.

Once you understand this, much about the media becomes understandable.

Fair enough, Professor.

Didn't we raise the flag twice on Iwo Jima?

My vote is for #5, especially if the photos convey the correct political message, i.e. the preteen Israeli girls writing messages to Nasrallah on live missiles.

fishbane, at least the pulling down of the Saddam statues, as well as other photo ops like the tearing down of the Berlin Wall, are actual events, that would have happened whether or not there were cameras present, and represent milestones in history. It's not as if some TV producer sat up one day and said, hey, let's yank down this statue over here, it'll make good news coverage.

I remain unconvinced that the photos were staged. The entire argument seems to hinge on discrepancies in the publication time... but that's not the same as the time of exposure, and may not represent any particularly useful information at all, except for the time that someone loaded those shots into the computer system. Note that one of the times was even changed!

I did a quick check of the images directly, and all of the IPTC/EXIF data has been stripped, so there's no way to tell exactly when they were taken (and granted, that information can be changed too, but it takes a little more effort and is more likely to be accurate).

As to the ethics, however, there are a few different situations to consider. First, the most extreme possibility, that the photographer was intentionally complicit in generating a scene that's deliberately deceptive. I think this is pretty clearly unethical and if it's not a firing offense, it should be. I'm not familiar with a single case where this was proved of a mainstream media photographer, however.

Second, the case where the photograph was part of a deliberately deceptive staged act, but the photographer didn't know that this was the case. I suspect that this happens fairly frequently whenever the resources are available by any given party (witness for instance the staged photo ops Bush set up in New Orleans, some of which actually interfered with relief efforts -- although some of them were pretty blatant, there's no reason to believe that the photographers had to be aware of the intent when they happened). It may have happened in this case as well, given the other appearances of the man in the picture, but it's impossible to prove from the evidence presented so far. When demonstrated, it would be proper for news sources to print a retraction, but that unfortunately doesn't seem to be common practice. (I can't think of a single case, in fact, though there may be some.)

Third, there's the situation where the event is real, but the photographer wouldn't have been there at all if it weren't for being tipped off by someone who wanted it photographed. A number of occurrences in Iraq fall into this category, and on this one I side very firmly with the photographer -- if it's news, take pictures of it, and it doesn't matter how you found out about it or who wants it to be published or not published. It's not a reporter's job to self-censor based on who happens to be inconvenienced by the truth.

Maybe it is just me but equating these staged photos which will be used as propaganda against Israel and blaming them for cruelty beyond the pale when they didn't do it is a far cry from Jessica Lynch. How about equating this with the photos where they claimed the Marines killed all those civilians in Iraq when the photo was taken weeks earlier and the deaths were committed by the Iraqi terrorists. Did the BBC ever apologize for printing those photos? How about the people gunned down at the intersection in Baghdad that won a Pulitzer Prize when the photographer was called there and the photo was staged for him. These have a whole lot more relationship to the current situation than anything to do with Jessica Lynch. Have the media outlets ever apologized for these screwups? Of course not because it fit their agenda. Don't look for it to happen with the Qana photos either.

I understand you're not trying to be snarky, but did you really think (5) was the answer? Of course, it's not. Check out, among other things, the Code of Ethics of the Society of Professional Journalists, which makes fairly clear that staged news events, including photographic coverage thereof, are generally improper. There are a variety of institutional and constitutional reasons why journalists' ethics codes, at least in the U.S., are self-enforcing rather than publicly enforced, reasons I hardly need adumbrate for the benefit of a superb book like "You Can't Say That." So I make no grand claims that this ethical principle is well-enforced, either through investigation or punishment. (That does not mean journalists not have been fired for themselves staging events; to my certain recollection, they have. I can't say how many have been fired for willfully using material staged by others, although I suspect there have been cases, and I'm not sure dismissal would be the appropriate response for inadvertently doing so.) Still, I should have thought it would be obvious to a layperson that such an ethical principle exists, and speaking as a former journalist I can say that no matter how great the failings of that profession, most mainstream journalists have internalized that principal at least as much as lawyers internalize their own professional norms. Enforcement, alas, is a different story.

On whether the toppling of Saddam's statue was staged, I have tried to stay away from conspiracy theory types, and haven't put a lot of research into it, but here's a story from the Seattle Times suggests that the toppling was the act of a Marine colonel, and that an Army psy-ops team, which both used loudspeakers to encourage an Iraqi crowd to participate, giving it the look of a spontaneous act undertaken by locals, and provided an Iraqi flag to drape over the statue's face in place of an American flag placed there by Marines. The story cites an unspecified Army report as its authority. I leave it to others to debate whether this made the act a staged affair; I'd put it somewhere in the middle. I should add that I provide this information with no particular political agenda, either on the war in Iraq or the events in Lebanon. I should also add that one of the best pieces debbunking another staged event in the same region -- the shooting of Mohammed al-Dura in Gaza -- was written by James Fallows, more or less a charter member of the MSM, and published in the Atlantic, which surely qualifies as a member of the MSM.

A different question I would ask is why you pose this question only of that cliched and non-specific group, the "MSM." Do you think the non-MSM should be able to present staged photos? Or that it doesn't? Or -- the most defensible argument, although in some ways a curious one -- that the MSM is more important and influential than the non-MSM, and so its ethics matter more? Or -- also quite defensible -- that hoping for a standardized set of ethical obligations for as disparate a category as the "non-MSM" is futile? However well or poorly the mainstream media (itself too disparate a category, in my view, especially given variations in quality) performs its job, there are all kinds of reasons why one might expect it to have a more coherent and well established set of ethical norms than does that congeries of outlets we call the non-MSM. Without in any way wishing to be an apologist for the press, my experience in the profession suggests that, on the whole, it does.

Is the problem that the photograph was "staged," or is the problem that reporters were told and/or reportered incorrectly that the man identified as a rescue worker in fact was a longstanding Hezbollah poobah? If the news agencies were under the mistaken impression that he was a rescue worker, and reported as much, then it would seem that a correction is in order.

Although I would suspect that the same picture with a caption describing the man as a Hezbollah poobah rather than a rescue worker would have gotten about the same play and had the same impact. The nauseating detail is the notion that this child's body was paraded around for hours in order to generate useful images.

In principle, this last aspect is only somewhat more troubling than the allegations that, e.g., President Bush's visit to New Orleans in the days after Katrina caused resources to be diverted from rescue operations. At least in this instance the child is already dead, although that also makes it seem more abhorrent.

When Emmett Till's mother left the casket open, it was a "staged" event. So what?
When someone holds a dead Lebanese child for the purposes of being photographed, it forces us to consider that children are currently being mauled religious fanatics engaged in an irreconcilable fight. (Or it would, if we weren't so de-sensitized).
In fact, I think Olmert should have to attend every Lebanese funeral. Or perhaps some of the other hawks on this blog would care to go? (And yes, the guys in HZB should have to do the same thing, but I don't know their names).
Maybe the grief of a parent burying a child could get through even to people so closed minded they've chosen to live their lives based on the superstitions of people who died centuries ago. But probably not.

1: Steve, I disagree. PersonFromPorlock hit the nail on the head. He described the environment in which journalism takes place. Journalists can and do aspire to better, but PFP is correct about which way the wind blows.

Note- pointing out the true basic goal of journalism (to sell advertising) does not in itself show that any given report is unreliable or shoddy. In general, just because someone has a colorable ulterior motive for a given action does not mean they act from ulterior motives or that they act badly in any way.

2: The very idea that an accusation against a member of any profession can be refuted by citing that profession's code of conduct is absurd right on its face. I'm surprised to see that 'point' made in this otherwise thoughtful conversation.

David:
I sympathise with what you are trying to do by referring to Hezbollah as the "army of god", but is this really a fair tactic? It seems to me that "Israel" translates to about the same thing ("struggles with god" - am I right?). Israel may not be the fanatical religious organization that Hezbollah is, but this seems sort of the point: we should let the actions of the different parties inform our views of them, rather than summary impressions based on the translations of organizations names.

Evan, it does 'change the tragedy' of the situation because Hezbollah has been 'fighting' a primarily PR campaign all along. Their hundreds of rockets have PR, not military accomplishment, as their primary goal. They launch those rockets from residential neighborhoods in the HOPE that photos like these will be the result. Giving them the maximum benefit of the doubt, in the hope that they will be permitted to launch those rockets indefinitely and with impunity- knowing that when and if Israel responds to the hundreds of rockets they will 'counterattack' with pictures like these.

So when we see the man behind the curtain, unless we are very closed minded, it DOES 'change the tragedy' in that it improves our understanding of what is ACTUALLY happening and who is ACTUALLY the author of the situation.

"The very idea that an accusation against a member of any profession can be refuted by citing that profession's code of conduct is absurd right on its face. I'm surprised to see that 'point' made in this otherwise thoughtful conversation."

Excellent refutation, except that: 1) In citing the SPJ code, I didn't set out to refute "an accusation against a member of [a] profession." I set out to explain the ethical policies of that profession, and nothing more, as is glaringly obvious from the rest of my comment. 2) Prof. Bernstein's post specifically began by asking whether "mainstream media outlets have a *policy* against publishing 'staged' photos that appear to be spontaneous." My comment was a directly responsive answer to his question.

So as scores of people are being slaughtered or injured (in both sides of this mess) this strikes you as the most blogworthy issue of the day?

This petty scorekeeping is sickening.

Israel is losing the propaganda war, because the majority of the news sources are biased against it. Whether a photo is staged is *very important*. Even though a staged photo doesn't directly kill or injure people, the staged photo and others like it affect the outcome of the war, and that *will* affect who gets killed or injured.

KA:
Maybe Israel is losing the propaganda war because they are the stronger power dropping bombs on civilians. The U.S. is "losing the propaganda war" in Iraq, and I don't think it's because any media outlets are biased against us, it's because we're in the wrong.

Evan, I agree that the deaths themselves are tragic, but I can't agree that that's the bottom line.

We all respond differently to death depending on how and why it happened. I'm sure you have a different response to a person who kills in self-defense than to a person who kills in a fit of pique, or to a person who kills in a legitimate accident versus one who kills while drunk driving. The bottom line is not death. Life and death are the stakes.

We should not shrink from describing the context, and we should not fail to note the differences among the actors. This stuff really does matter.

What bothers me about a focus on the deaths themselves is that such a focus is NOT neutral. It serves the stated purpose of the terrorists by obliterating the context of events.

No problem. Thanks. PH

It would be nice to think that the news media were totally unbiased and wrote and published only "fact." That, IMHO, is a totally unreasonable expectation; in fact, it is clear that modern combatants are increasingly using the media as a propaganda arm for their cause. While the problem is clear, I don't think anything can be done about it--it will ultimately remain an issue of caveat emptor for the consumer of media reports/pictures/videos. If journalism is indeed "the first draft of history," it is increasingly inaccurate, I fear.

First I have to commend Professor Bernstein for not joining the chorus of rightwing Qana deniers who seem to have sprung up in the aftermath of this tragedy.

Actually, it is a more subtle way of accomplishing the same thing - denying the importance of the underlying event.

You could say - "Nope, Qana never happened" but then you would soon be proven to be an idiot.

Much more effective to naval gaze with questions like: "Hmmm, were these photos legit?" And invite the discourse to go down that path. As you can see from the many posts above, it is an effective strategy.

It is borrowing a page from the playbook of Holocaust deniers who quickly admit that there were mass killing but then move the dialogue in the direction of quibbling about whether it was actually 6 million or "only" 2 million or something like that.

At this point we don't know for certain whether the photos were staged or not, though it is a reasonable assumption. The ubiquitous "Green Helmut" fellow seems to be a key figure. Add to this the statement that the IDF may not be responsible for deaths in Qana. If it is the case that Israelie combat videos show that the building was still standing after two subsequent raids it does open the possibility that Hezbollah and not the IDF brought the building down. Whether Hezbollah obtained corpses from a morgue or decided that it was logistically easier to have the prospective corpses convey themselves into the building before detonation remains to be determined.

MSM is a useless phrase, inasmuch as it must include not only the New York Times but the New York Daily News, which certainly have different approaches to, eg, Israel news.

The blogosphere, including this part of it, and talk radio and all the bloviators usually evaluate news reports based on the (assumed) political reliability of the reporter.

Professor Bernstein, the avowed antiStalinist, should avoid this, of all people. Consider that perhaps the greatest single news report of the 20th century, the proof that the Russians did the Katyn massacre, was prepped, sponsored, stage-managed and disseminated by -- Goebbels.

The blogosphere, including this part of it, and talk radio and all the bloviators usually evaluate news reports based on the (assumed) political reliability of the reporter.

Just about everyone I know evaluates the news based on a number of factor's to include the political affiliation
and bias of the reporter and news organization.

And of course, Te, those that believe the Israelis were responsible for the killings at Qana know the truth; those of us that think Hezbollah are responsible and are using the carnage to only further their aims cannot possibly be correct. Pathetic.

I guess it's easier to just make things up rather than to respond to what I actually posted, but the last time I checked the Israeli government has admitted that it was responsible for the killings.

I don't spend much time waiting around in the conspiracy theory blogosphere, so I haven't looked at the "evidence" about whether or not the whole shebang was fake or not. A trusted third is credible evidence of that, will hear about it soon enough.but come in the meantime, let's go back to our regularly scheduled programming we can talk about whether or not the camera angles of the carnage are "fake" and other such nonsense.

RonMexico,

I'm not a fan of Bernstein's - I think his hyperpartisanship distorts and occludes the discussions of the issues he chooses to highlight. But even from that perspective, I think his use of "Party of God" is clever and appropriate. It's not a code word, it's just the English approximation of Hezbollah. He made the point in an earlier post that Western ears would be less sympathetic to the group if its religious extremism was more transparent, and that since the name is meant to be literal and obvious by the group itself it should be presented that way. I agree on both points. So while I agree that the VC is listing further to the right than I'd like as a reader, I don't think it's fair to ding Bernstein for using "Party of God."

Here is the point: remembering all of the inaccurate statements on the Palestinian/Lebanese/Red Crescent/Red Cross side during the early part of the 1982 war; remembering the Mohammed al-Dura affair, where it was ultimately proven that the boy *could not have been* shot by the Israeli forces; remembering the phony numbers on the Palestinian side with regard to Jenin in 2002; remembering last month's "Israeli shelling of innocent picnickers" in Gaza, which turned out to have been likely caused by Hamas actions.... the point is, that whenever you hear, "...according to Palestinian sources", or "...according to Lebanese sources", or certainly, "...according to Hizbollah sources", if you don't take that information with many large grains of salt and a very questioning attitude, you're not being realistic. If you're a journalist and you don't probe and investigate, you're not doing your job.

Yeah, SeaLawyer, I'm aware of that, and I'm trying to persuade you that that is a really poor way of assessing the usefulness of news reports.

The 21st century is yet young, but the best piece of reporting in America so far was Charles Johnson's expose of the Bush National Guard hoax.

I don't think there's a more partisan journalist in the country than Johnson (and I suspect most of my colleagues wouldn't even accept that he is a journalist), and when his point was picked up by PowerLine, that just condemned the story further in the eyes of leftists.

But Johnson's report was exact and unimpeachable, nevertheless.

Same with the No Gun Ri expose. AP won a Pulitzer for that hoax, and it was amateurs who first raised questions about the veracity of the report. That it was unquestionably a hoax was finally nailed down by serving Air Force officers.

Each report has to be assessed on its intrinsic merits. Its source should be considered but can almost never be considered a guarantee of anything. That oughtn't to be a huge hurdle on a law blog.

I've seen enough obviously faked Arab atrocity pictures to be wary of all of them. I have no opinion, so far, about the Qana reports, but I read some of the posts that Professor Bernstein declined to link to.

The debunking factoid that makes the biggest impression on me (so far) is the observation (if authentic) that the corpses were ashen not bloody.

That's exactly the sort of evidence that hoaxers never think to make allowances for.

John Morris, a medieval historian ('The Age of Arthur') made the point, more than 30 years ago, that the most reliable documentary evidence is the 'furniture' that surrounds a fake story.

If the faker expects to put it over on contemporaries who know, say, what goes on in a 6th century English church, then his description of a 6th century church had better be exact if he expects them to also believe that the saint he is honoring also walked on water or talked with animals.

I love Passing By. Absolute and total ignorance. Just for the record (though most people here know it) Mohammed Al-Dura was killed during a firefight between Palestinians and Israelis. Everyone believed that the Israelis killed him as he and his father shelterd behind a wall in the crossfire. The Israelis apologised, end of story. Except that people kept investigating, and discovered that the angles didn't work. The Palestinians had actually killed him (intentionally or accidentally who knows), based on where the forces were positioned and where Mohammed and his father hid.

This has been such a controversy thanks to the vivid movies and photos of the family's agony as they hid and Mohammed's death. A French network made a documentary about this, blaming the Israelis, and it created such an outrage that the Israelis went through the evidence again, belatedly discovering who was responsible.

Combine that with the Jenin "massacre" and the Gaza beach "shelling", and one has to consider that there may be alternate explanations for these tragedies. The likeliest explanation, unfortunately, is that the building collapsed thanks to a bomb dropped on the building, either immediately, after several hours a la WTC 7, or thanks to relatively close explosions in the morning. Given the relative ethics of the parties involved, and the PR skills of Hezbollah, greater evidence is required rather than simply taking the likeliest explanation (call it a dull Occam's razor).

Do journalists take staged/faked events on faith? Absolutely. Look at Anderson Cooper's report from Beirut, where he highlighted that Hezbollah dragged the media to an ambulance station, had them interview the drivers, and then had the ambulances "race off with sirens blaring to emergencies that don't exist". Hez controls journalists access, controls what they take photos of, and threatens the life of journalists.

What does Hamas mean? Hamas is the acronym for Harakat al-Muqawama al-Islamiyya, the Islamic Resistance Movement. Not quite as evocative as Party of God or Islamic Jihad, but fairly close.

There's another question wrt Hez's good intentions. They produced a huge, full color banner with Rice's face on it denouncing the Qana massacre. It was unfurled within hours of the collapse of the building, furthering suspicions. It may just be that they have a crack staff of graphic artists and large format printers on call, but it would stretch the abilities of most major cities in the West, never mind Beirut, to get it done within hours.

Harry,
I don't disagree that news reports should be rejected based on who wrote it. But I will say that based on who is doing the reporting it should deserve more scrutiny.

I live in Minneapolis and regularly read the Startribune, a paper that will omit facts in stories and even re-write paragraphs from AP or Reuters stories to better fit the political views of the editors.
One of the reasons I stopped reading the WaPo was the Jessica Lynch story and starting reading blogs was the Rathergate story. Just in case anyone does not remember the WaPo editorial pages in the months leading to the Jessica Lynch story had a number of op-eds saying that women should have an increased combat role. Then I am reading about the how the modern day Spartan is in fact a woman "according to unnamed pentagon sources".
How am to view/read articles in light of all of this? Should I just take everything that a paper says as fact? Or do I need to research every article to verify it?

In short I really do wish that all journalist would just report facts and not interject personal/political bias into the stories.

Been reading for a long time, but I think this is the first time I've posted.

Commenting on the MSM in general, not this specifically (since I have no knowledge of this specific item), I was far too close to a news item whilst growing up. My best friend was murdered coming home from his high-school prom. The parents refused to talk to the media. So, the media (and I'm talking about major NY papers) made things up. I guess my favorite (poor choice of words) quote was that the parents had no idea what he would be doing in that neighborhood. He was killed several blocks from his house. Photos of friends and next door neighbors were labelled as the parents.

Possilbly this has led me to be more cynical than most, but I feel that newpapers should be printed with a warning that information can, and often will, be wrong.

Not looking to defend them, but on the MSM side, I feel that this is due to the overwhelming pressure to get the story out. Fact checking takes time, and 2 hours ago is a long time these days.

While people reading this might take into account the affiliations of reporters / newspapers, do you really think that most people take this into account? I don't.

The other item I have second-hand knowledge of was that I knew people in Northern Ireland who were paid so that photographers could take pictures of them throwing rocks at tanks.


I feel that everyone would be better off if they just remembered two things:

1) Everyone has an agenda. Even if that agenda is simply to sell more newspapers.

2) The closer you are to a news story, the more likely you are to see how bad reporting is, the farther away you are, the more likely you are to take it at face value.


Bart

Harry,

As I pointed out, since I was only close to that one major story, and saw how badly it was handled, it has tainted my view. But, just so that you know, I'm not talking about a middle page news story. This was front-page news for several days, and was carried nationally.

Regarding Northern Ireland, if the reporters offer money to the people to throw rocks at tanks, how is that NOT the reporters fault ?!? The people didn't approach the reporters and ask to be paid, the reporters approached the people so that they could have a story with pictures to accompany it.

Harry,

I should have been more specific in the first post, but in the case I knew about, the people were approached by, and paid by, the reporters. Sorry for the confusion.