Apparently, Israel's big crime in Cole's mind was not to wait until Iran and the Party of God actually began to make significantly more progress on their threat to commit genocide.

Well, yeah.

And not just in Cole's mind, either. :-(

And feeling really smug about themselves at the same time.

Not at all like the commenters.

Of course they are going to kill Nasrallah, if they can.

Criticizing Olmert for that is wimpy propaganda.

Here I come with another logical quandary. We have a clear-cut case of an impropriety with the doctored photograph. Clearly, Reuters failed to exercise proper editorial control and ended up publishing a falsified photograph.

Do we condemn Reuters for inadequate editorial supervision and recruitment, or do we dismiss this as a case of "one bad apple"?

Here's what makes it a quandary: we have to apply exactly the same reasoning process to the crimes committed at Abu Ghraib. Do we condemn the Bush Administration for inadequate supervision of the military, or do we dismiss this as a case of "a few bad apples"?

It seems to me that both decisions are the same, and so, whatever your politics, you have to reach the same conclusion in both cases.

Erasmussimo,

Let's compare. The press broke the Abu Ghraib story after there was an active criminal investigation in progress by the Army. Which likely would have proceeded whether the story was reported or not.

Reuters was caught promulgating doctored photographs, after weeks (if not months) of outside claims of phony or staged photos. They stonewalled until there was irrefutable proof of the doctoring.

Yes, it looks identical to me.

Reuters needs DRM. Reuters and co. are providing photos from a war to the public in a timely fashion. That's an invaluable service. In this case, however, it didn't control the whole process and produced a lemon, damaging it's reputation and shedding doubt on every image it produces. The end product is of low quality since we don't know how much "truthiness" has been slipped into the product along the pipeline.

Reuters should provide production &provenance information with their images. Each stage of the production process should produce a secure, verifiable tag stored as metadata in the image. Software could assess the history of the image and provide provenance, veracity, and manipulation metrics to end-users. Even if they can't secure the process out to the CCDs in their contractor/stringer's camera and can't produce accurate time,location,author stamps for each image (and there's no reason they shouldn't be able to), there'd be a history for images from each Reuters source that could used to figure quality/veracity of the produced image.

Do we condemn Reuters for inadequate editorial supervision and recruitment, or do we dismiss this as a case of "one bad apple"?

Boph. Reuters is MSM which cultivates a "word of god" level of veracity, an unacheivable standard especially on deadline in a war zone. So their process is flawed because one bad apple can upset the whole cart for a while. If their pipeline considered trustworthiness throughout the process they'd be able to say, "we have 18% confidence that this is smoke from an Israeli attack taken by so &so at such &such a time blah, blah, blah". Instead they're saying, "I'll never lie to you, baby. Honest. Trust me. Just don't bother me while I'm making sausage."

And as I recall, tens(hundreds?) of thousands of Serbs ultimately had to permanently flee from areas held by the Bosnians, despite NATO "protection,"

Shouldn't it read Kosovo Liberation Army or Bosnian Serbs, instead of Bosnians?

It's the digital security that would be the expensive part, I suspect; Time date and GPS based location encoding is an off the shelf feature of more than one digital camera, but I don't know if there's a market out there already for cameras that don't "trust" the photographer.

Ought to be, though; Fake digital photographic evidence is a growing problem.

But if that's too much for you, you can use you can use http://volokh.com/?exclude=davidb to block my posts

I've been wondering for a while if the Conspiracy couldn't implement tags, and then allow people to exclude content on the basis of tags instead of authors. I wouldn't mind reading http://volokh.com/?excludetag=israel, for example.

Donald Kahn,

You talkin' to me ???

Sorry. Couldn't resist.

Never have trusted them. Anyone who reads their stufff knows their bias. This is just icing on the rotting cake.

Who is green helmet? A more interesting question is who is commenter Mark Spittle?

CRAZY! This clown shoots lasers out of his eyes and actually flys. Seriously. Can Green Helmet guy do THAT?

On Qana, why couldn't Israel send a ground strike force in to take out the target instead of dropping a bomb. If they knew it was a "human shield", wouldnt the porportional thing to do is to jump soldiers in and take out the targt?

No, the proportional thing to do would be to bomb the missile factories in Syria and Iran.

This blog commentator understands that a dead 'civilian' is defined as one who is found without a weapon.

An 18-yr old male, at the scene of a bombed missile battery, is classified as a 'civilian' if he wasn't carrying a rifle (or if it was blown out of his hands by the shock).

This is the real thing folks. 61 years ago yesterday, 90,000 real civilians were vaporized. This conflict will get out of hand if the IDF is not enabled to take the actions necessary to eliminate an unethical enemy.

I don't get this:

Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Olmert on Saturday rejected European criticism of Israel's massive bombing of Lebanon and its killing of hundreds of innocent civilians. He pointed to Kosovo as precedent for what he was doing.

Olmert also said he thought he might just murder Hasan Nasrallah.
Uh, Ehud, you're supposed to be playing NATO in this interview, remember? Not Milosevic. You're getting your precedents for murder, mass or otherwise, mixed up.

Besides, the whole analogy is wrong. Milosevic's forces were ethnically cleansing the Kosovars. NATO was protecting the latter (and the Israeli government of the time supported this effort, given its alliance with Turkey). Who was Hizbullah ethnically cleansing in early July? In fact, it is the Israelis who have behaved in the past two weeks like Milosevic's Serbian troops, who systematically attempted to displace the Kosovars during the war. And then the NATO estimate is that their campaign killed 5000 Serbian military personnel and at most 1500 civilians. Israel's war has killed nearly 700 (maybe 900) civilians and many fewer Hizbullah fighters. So, the argument fails on all counts.

Milosevic's forces were not ethnically cleansing "Kosovars", they were ethnically cleansing Albanian Kosovars, not Serbian Kosovars. [Of course, by now, under NATO, the Albanian Kosovars have just about completed their ethnic cleansing of the Serbian Kosovars, and NATO is going to declare Albanian Kosovo independent of Serbia.]

Who would the Party of Koranic God be ethnically cleansing? How about non-Moslems from So Lebanon.

Does anyone believe this:

NATO estimate is that their campaign killed 5000 Serbian military personnel

NATO air forces estimated they had "killed" hundreds if not thousands of Serbian military APC's, tanks and other vehicles in Kosovo. Turned out they killed maybe ten of each, but lots of wood and cardboard dummies.

Cole is right that the analogy breaks down, because NATO bombed lots of purely civilian areas in Serbia proper away from the military action, while Israel is trying to bomb the military that is tormenting it.

I missed Olmert's analogy. Could have sworn the word precedent was used and a precedent does not have to be analogous. Does Cole own a dictionary?
Small, bitter minds lead to small, bitter statements. But teacher gives a failing grade, "the argument fails on all counts". But Olmert doesn't see the need to argue, least of all with sanctimonious trash like Juan Cole. Now if Albanian Kosovars had been setting off nail bombs, killing school children, and firing rockets maybe we'd be a little closer to an analogy, just not the one Cole would like.

Eddy: you know that the IDF has killed more civilians than HBA..you know that how? Ahhhh: you got it from Reuters.

I feel Cole's analysis is off the deep end, it's not because he likes the peak oil theory. The predicted consequences of peak oil seem to be arriving: minimal to zero surplus production capacity; minor transient reductions in supply causing disproportionate price changes; major remaining oil supplies in increasingly inaccessible or politically hostile areas. Iran's supplies of oil will be critical for at least (bare minimum) five years.

I think Cole is mistaken about cause and response, however. Cole places too much deliberate emphasis on conscious market and political manipulation and too little on the classic "invisible hand" pressures. It's not the hawks that are looking for this trouble. The region has been unstable since at least the founding of Israel. The current mess is comparable to the Bosnia/Serbia/Etc civil war in the historical scale... not (yet) worthy of the WWIII name being thrown around. (Of course, WWI started with a minor Bosnia/Serbia incident.) The reason we're all paying such close attention is not because we want to conquer for conquests sake, but that chaos in the region has disproportionate repercussions on the US (and global) economy. Outside entanglements spreading the scope of a conflict... hmmm.

Still, "More wars to come" has been an easy prediction since some Funky Mushrooms gave rise the the Book Of Revelations. It's not possible with public information to distinguish between hawks leading the times, or merely reacting to the times. Cole's suspicion is merely untestable paranoia.

I'd halfway agree with his suggestion about the importance of alternate energy, although I'd add nuclear to the mix and disagree about the ease of it. Whether or not this is the Big One, I see no reason to believe that the mid-East oil zone will grow much more stable any time soon. Increasing our energy independence will result in diminishing our economic reliance on that particular ticking time bomb. But that is NOT a simple problem.

For a long time, Reuters refused to use the term 'terrorist' when describing the 9/11 hijackers. This is when a lot of people realized there was something a bit off about them.

As far as I know, they still refuse to do so, or to apply it to any Islamic terrorist. (They do apply it to the IRA, though, which shows their bias.)

Politicians stage photos all the time -- how about the time Mr. Bush landed on the aircraft carrier with the sign "Mission Accomplished". Does anybody here believe that Mr. Bush is in the habit of flying around in combat aircraft dressed in flight suits? Of course not. This was clearly a staged event, intended to provide the public with images favorable to the President.

But the "staging" was done by the administration, not the media, and the latter portrayed it as such. If they had put forth such images as if they were candid shots, that would have been a problem. In other words, the fact that it was "clearly a staged event" makes it different than the Hezbollah situations, which are not "clearly" staged.

I feel Cole's analysis is off the deep end, it's not because he likes the peak oil theory.

What I found most amusing about Cole's post was that it was like this supposed Middle East expert just discovered that there was oil in Iran. When I read it, I got the sense that it was a revelation to him. Indeed, little of his piece really had anything to do with "peak oil" (also not a new theory, of course), and most simply had to do with the fact that there's lots of oil there.


Also, as per Cole's attempt at debunking the analogy:

Besides, the whole analogy is wrong. Milosevic's forces were ethnically cleansing the Kosovars. ... Who was Hizbullah ethnically cleansing in early July?

Does Cole not realize that the position of virtually the entire Muslim world -- including Hezbollah's patron, Iran -- is that Israel needs to be ethnically cleansed of Jews? (Answer: yes. That's why Cole invented a phony semantic debate a few months ago to argue that wiping Israel off the map doesn't mean wiping Israel off the map.) Does he not realize that complaints about Israeli "settlers" are actually calls to cleanse the "Occupied Territories" of Jews? Does he not realize that Hezbollah has explicitly said, in the last few years, that Jews need to be shipped back to Germany? Does Israel have to wait until the ethnic cleansing is actually happening to defend itself?

Date:
Fri, 2006-07-28 00:00
Author:
Matthias Gebauer
URL:

Source:
Spiegel Online
Body:

Propaganda is part of every war, just like bombs and soldiers. Still, it's remarkable how professionally Israel deals with foreign journalists, catering conscientiously to all their needs. Lunch included.

The mother of Israeli soldier Seargeant Shimon Dahan at her son's funeral on Thursday.

The phone rings at 9 a.m. — right on time. "Hello, this is the Government Press Office," pipes a woman's voice. "What are you planning to do today? Do you need an idea?" And then the suggestions just keep coming — interview partners; a tour to the houses in Haifa that were struck by Katyusha rockets, complete with victim interviews. An expert will come along too, one who explains the nature of the rockets — "in clean sound bites, if you want."

There's more on the plate. "The highlight is still to come," says the lady from Israel's press office, the GPO. "We can offer an interview in Naharya with the parents of the kidnapped soldiers," she says. She explains that the parents of Ehud Goldwasser, who has been held by Hezbollah since July 12, are waiting in a hotel. An interpreter? No need. "They speak good English, don't worry."

Many journalists come along, most of them by GPO bus. About 15 camera teams have set up their equipment. Twenty radio and print journalists are enjoying their coffee and the specially prepared sandwiches. Then the parents arrive. The father self-consciously steps up to the microphone. The desk in front of him bristles with microphones — as if a politician were giving a press conference. He's sweating slightly; the veins on his forehead are bulging.

Shlomo Goldwasser doesn't have much to say — not much more than the banal phrases security officials often teach parents so they stay on message. "They, my son's kidnappers, are responsible for Ehud's safety," Goldwasser says. "They are also responsible for returning him to us soon — and unscathed." He says he can't think of anything else to tell us. He's a father, he says, not a politician.

"Please don't smile"

Goldwasser has barely finished speaking when a journalistic scrum erupts and cameramen start to shout. "Mr. Goldwasser, over here," one of them calls. "Please don't smile." Others want to hear childhood stories — "It tugs on the viewers' heartstrings." Elsewhere, the man's wife has to leaf repeatedly through the family photo album. She responds to the orders given her like a robot and would presumably even start crying if she were told to do so. Fortunately no one makes such a request.

The disgraceful spectacle goes on for 90 minutes. The parents say they've got nothing to do with politics, nor with the war. They've been told appearances in public could save their son. And it's all organized and choreographed by the Israeli government's press office — organized for foreign journalists, so that one of the reasons for the current war, the suffering of parents and civilians, receives the public attention it is due. But the parents, in this story, somehow come off only as extras.

Propaganda is a part of war — especially when a state wants the world to see its decision to take up arms as justified and just. It's no different than the run up to the first Gulf War or the more recent war in Afghanistan — or, more perfidiously, to the second US war against Iraq. Vast armies of public relations workers develop an emotionally charged image meant to provide media and public support for the conflict's architects. It's standard procedure — public relations for war.

Not all the information circulated in such a controlled atmosphere, of course, is to be believed. But it's hard to criticize Israel for wanting to see victims of Hezbollah rockets — 17 killed since the beginning of the war against the militant group — in the media. Indeed it is precisely these victims that fuel the Israeli operations currently raging in southern Lebanon.

PR warriors take to the mountains

Still, Israel's support and supervision of foreign journalists seems downright excessive. As soon as you've received your press credentials from the GPO, you're bombarded with e-mails and phone calls. When covering other crisis regions, German reporters often have to make an effort to be extra nice and polite and have to search out interviewees and contacts themselves. Not here. In Israel, reporters are on an all-inclusive package trip — and are well looked after.

Well-thought-out story ideas including transportation, lunch and selected military experts — all these things are offered without ever having to be asked for. Many journalists happily accept the offer. For days, images of Israeli artillery units flickered on TV screens the world over — one reason of course being that the PR warriors always took the camera teams to the frontlines around sunset. The soft, warm twilight is favored by camera men and photographers.

An e-mail that arrived on Wednesday is a good example. It offers no less than 11 news stories. The Israeli refugees, perhaps. Or the problems with Arab Israelis? A feature about how an entire village has been dispersed across Israel? A report on people who had to leave their houses? Former hostages? Or a village that has been shot at for decades? It's all available.

There's no need to go anywhere. "The contacts can be reached by phone," the woman from the press office says. "It's better to do it that way, especially for the radio." The organizers know exactly what the reporters want. Radio and TV journalists often have to go on air so often that they barely get a chance to leave the hotel. So when a Katyusha rocket strikes, an e-mail containing a list of eyewitnesses, complete with their mobile phone numbers, is more than welcome.

Language barriers are willingly breached as well. Every list includes eyewitnesses with different language profiles. There's plenty to choose from in an immigrant country like Israel: English, French, Spanish, Russian and of course several German speakers in every city. Laborious simultaneous translations are rendered superfluous by the service.

The Israeli public relations experts, though, have their work cut out for them. With public opinion turning against the Israelis following the bombing of the UN outpost in southern Lebanon, the country's use of excessive force is once again a major issue. And the war doesn't seem as though it will come to an end any time soon.

David, you assert that there's a difference between the obviously staged nature of the aircraft carrier event and the (possibly) deceptively staged nature of the Hezbollah photo-ops. Yet, the photographers were being guided by Hezbollah press people, and no effort was made to conceal this fact. Clearly, this was a Hezbollah photo-op. What's deceptive about that? Moreover, no claims have been made that the content of the photos was false or misleading. Nobody has declared that the corpses were faked, or that the buildings were not destroyed by IDF actions. So far, the complaint seems to be about the fact that Hezbollah's PR people have gotten just as good as Western PR operations.

Is anyone willing to argue that the smoke reveals something about the photographer’s or Reuters’ intentions? The photo does reveal that Reuters has insufficient quality control checks in photoprocessing – a journalistic sin, to be sure. The photo does not reveal, as best I can tell, that Reuters or the photographer had nefarious (and politically oriented) motives, to shape public perception. Moreover, it is at least debatable that the doctored photo would have had any effect on perceptions at all, relative to the original (light) smoke photo, or whether the darker smoke really does signal greater kill rates.

In the absence of an analysis of photos that are ostensibly anti- or pro-Israel, another possibility is that Reuters is an equal opportunity offender: Reuters might release pro- and anti-Israel photos that differ from the originals (or that are staged) equally often. (I suspect that such occurrences are rare, relative to the total corpus of photos promulgated during a period of time, but this is an empirical question.)

Although I am heartened that blogs provided a de facto quality control check on the MSM, some blogs seem to suggest this is another Rathergate or gottcha moment. I am not so sure, and I would like to see a comparative analysis (perhaps sampling randomly from sets of photos deemed pro- or anti-Israel), to determine if the MSM disproportionately doctors ostensibly anti-Israel photos, and to determine the frequency with which this occurs.

NRWO,

The photographer in question also took two pictures from slightly different angles of the same rubble. Then, he claimed that the rubble was the result of the bombings of the "previous night." So, what is so bad about that? Well, the pictures were "dated" a week apart.

The plot thickens . . .

Details here

Zed, we cross-posted, so I have just now read your post. Thank you for the information on digital signatures. I knew that it was theoretically possible but I didn't realize that some of this has already been implemented. It certainly suggests that, in the future, all news services should require that photographers submit anything remotely controversial in raw format, so that its provenance can be verified.

Erasmussimo:

There are some technical hurdles to overcome before one can go all the way with that (in particular, a photographer trying to transmit those images over a shaky cell phone link may very well not have the time to send raw files between 8 and 20 megabytes in size per image, nor the memory card space to be storing them in the first place), but certainly I would have figured that the metadata would at least have been checked.

"http://volokh.com/?exclude=davidb"

this is a good start. but in order to make the VC a readable legal blog, one needs the syntax for this as there are other posters to be purged. eg, is it "[firstname][last initial]" for every poster? multiples separated by commas, spaces, other?

thanks.

Richard Aubrey, you may be talking about bad faith by Reuters but my "bias" reads it as ongoing attempts to discredit an entire profession for reporting facts that DB and others on this former legal blog don't like. Were we to draw the same conclusions about the legal profession based on the misdeeds of one lawyer, I assume those on this former legal blog would be up in arms.

If it's only Reuters we're talking about, then the analogy would be condemning an entire firm should be attacked for the actions of one unscrupulous attorney. As far as I know, Greenberg Traurig is still in business, despite having Abramoff as a former partner. Which is as it should be.

But in Bernstein's world, the analysis begins with complaints of those who reports facts negative to Israel. If misdeeds of someone in the media can be discovered all the better to smear the entire profession so that such negative facts are likewise discredited.

Jack Abramoff has and will be thoroughly punished for his actions. It appears this Reuters employee will be as well. It defies belief that one profession (journalism) can be attacked when the other is not.

Don't tell me this is just about Reuters. One can hear Bernstein (Powerline, Malkin, et al) salivate when they stumble upon journalistic error. The underlying message always becomes: don't trust the facts being reported that make MY side look bad. It's intellectually honest and sad, particularly for a scholar of laws.

A former prof of mine at Tel Aviv University and Holocaust survivor used to take great pride in the fact that Israel had developed a crime rate in line with the rest of the Western World. He disliked the stereotype of the bookish Jew, and was happy his people had its criminals just like everyone else.

Guess what. The Jason Blairs, Steven Glass's and lone Reuters photog in this case are criminals. Just like everyone else.

How does that change the facts on the ground in Lebanon for you?

Josh. You referred to every party in war doing p.r. things. We were referring to Reuters doing p.r. things. So either you missed the point or you figure Reuters is a party in this war.

If you want to talk about absolving organizations because the lowest person involved is punished, I'm sure you'd apply that to the US response to the misdeeds at Abu Ghraib. Right?

Hajj has been faking stuff and the hard-eyed editors have been missing it. Either Reuters lies about their vetting process being thorough and disinterested, or they lie about vetting at all. In neither case do they tell the truth, and none of that has to do with Hajj, who isn't being quoted. So we're up a couple of levels.

If an organization can't do the job it claims it's doing, the rest of us are entitled to notice and go elsewhere for the service.

While it is impossible to prove somebody's motivation--they may be lying even to their diary--that doesn't mean we can't make some judgments.

We are not in a position to get Reuters personnels' wrists up between the shoulder blade and make them admit what we all know is true. That doesn't mean they aren't doing it. If the only allowable proof is the confession of the perp, criminal law is in trouble. And don't bother getting all literal and obfuscatory on me and pointing out this isn't a criminal matter.

Well, Josh, if you think it's an excellent analogy, then the Reuters equivalent of a Brigadier General needs to be fired. Along with several in between. Failing that, Reuters is failing.
Or perhaps I missed it?
If Reuters isn't firing the equivalent of a Brigadier General, the analogy doesn't hold.
In fact, what it means is the negligence, the wink-nod to the editors, the lack of interest in checking the output, all of the equivalents of what got so many people in trouble ref AG is going unaddressed.
Lousy analogy, which, btw, I didn't make.