Saturday, February 10, 2007

The Media Vultures and How to Change Public Opinion

Little Green Footballs has a picture from Qana that you surely didn't see in newspapers or on television. It's a different angle shot of the dead baby display. This one shows the many, many photographers honing in on the baby as emblematic of the bombing of Qana by the Israelis.

This angle’s a revealing one, an angle that for some reason, we haven’t seen before: the view from behind the “paramedics” who paraded with bodies for hours, staging and arranging them for an obviously very eager world media.

Then the obvious question is asked:
Why was this picture left in the editor’s kill file until now?

Because it really wrecks the suspension of disbelief that actors need to convince the audience.

It’s like seeing the scaffolds and lights and fake landscapes behind the scenes at a theater, in the middle of a performance.

The Qana photographs are some of the most gut-wrenching, heart-breaking images you could ever imagine. And that’s why it’s important to recognize that there are people with souls so dead and intentions so evil that they will cynically use these photographs to manipulate your feelings.

We all knew that many of the photographs were staged to try to sway Western opinion against the Israelis. But having the photographic evidence seems to disgust me even more.