A photo of children being buried after an attack in Ukraine led the Sept. 9 New York Times. I looked at it repeatedly, turning away, then returning. No gore. No bloody bandages. No hovering physicians. A few grieving relatives and neighbors.
One casket was closed and being covered.The other, open, showed a young girl, seemingly intact and at peace, although we know she’s dead.
She’s beautiful. It’s a 21st century color version of a 19th century daguerreotype keepsake of a dead child.
And it triggered a flashback. Another page 1 photo in another paper. A crow settled on a child’s closed casket during a Minnesota funeral for two children and their mother, killed in a 1960’s tornado.
Two caskets, one with a mother and child, the other with the second child.
Black and white. A bleak prairie, flat horizon and grey sky.
But enough about me. Let’s talk about you and the power of images in the news media to attract and repel us.
For the moment, let’s set aside Old Media and talk about the varieties of images available online.
Did you watch Wall Street Journal reporter Danny Pearl being decapitated by Islamist terrorists in Pakistan?
Or Islamist terrorists beheading American freelance journalists James Foley and Steve Sotloff?
Or an ISIL butcher decapitating Brit David Haines, a veteran aids worker?
None was killed in combat. All were kidnap victims.
Then there are the images of captured Syrian and Iraqi Muslims being murdered by gunmen who attempt to dignify their slaughter as Islamic.
Yet more images show young jihadis — some of them Westerners — holding up heads of other murdered captives.
If you seek out and look at any of these images, are you confirming the Islamists’ judgment of your taste and social media as a way to reach you?
In short, are you a co-conspirator, abetted by New Media?
So far, I know of no one who might prosecute you for watching obscenely violent Islamists’ videos from Syria and Iraq, although you should assume that someone’s tracking your online searches and the frequency and duration of your viewing.
After all, what’s the point of the terrorists’ increasingly sophisticated propaganda if no one sees it? Be sure, jihadis want to know if it’s being seen. Otherwise, it’s wasted as a tool of terror and an apparently successful appeal to potential recruits.
The images are a modern analog to 13th century Mongols who reportedly piled skulls of residents whose cities they conquered. Both focus the minds of populations who fear they could be next.
Or as CNN put it, “ISIS wants the world to know how brutal it can be. The insurgents are experts at using footage of their crimes as propaganda to terrify those who disagree with their radicalism and to threaten foreign leaders. The visuals are as much a part of ISIS’ terrorism as its bloody march across Iraq and Syria.”
Charlie Cooper, whom CNN identified as a Middle East researcher at the Quilliam Foundation, added:
“Every time a still or clip from an ISIS video is shown, the group gets what it wants: the oxygen of publicity. Of course, it is necessary that people the world over are aware of the atrocities occurring at the hands of ISIS, but journalists must be careful not to do the jihadists’ job for them.”
Quilliam is new to me. Its website describes a counter-extremism think-tank. I liked Cooper’s “oxygen of publicity” phrase and I’m relying on CNN’s choice of sources to quote him.
While no foreign journalist — or any journalist — would aspire to embed with ISIL, Hamas is taking a different approach to the same goal: propaganda to persuade others to accede to its demands.
Hamas also has become increasingly sophisticated in its manipulation of our viewing habits and the needs of journalists who satisfy our desire to view violent images.
Hamas embeds combatants in Gaza’s civilian population, The Weekly Standard noted, but “without reporters and cameras there to document the carnage, the blood that Hamas compels Gazans to shed on its behalf would be wasted. Hamas thus needs reporters in Gaza.”
The magazine said Western media previously “played deaf and dumb” rather than risk a loss of access to the most compelling Hamas images in the conflict with Israel. Control of access turned Western media into “documentarians of Israeli war crimes and only that,” the Weekly Standard said. It worked because Hamas has “a very canny understanding of our media stars. Too many are vain. They want the story, and if it’s in a war zone they want to be praised for bravery under fire. … The problem is, when you’re taking orders from Hamas, you’re not really covering a war. You’re collaborating with a terrorist group.”
Even that is changing, the magazine said. “Western media have finally started to push back against the scripted narratives handed to them by terrorist groups. Reporters are beginning to tell the truth about Gaza. A Finnish TV crew showed how Hamas was firing missiles from a hospital. An Indian crew documented how other missiles were fired from residential areas. Hamas also used foreign reporters as shields. A French journalist showed that Hamas had located its arms near a hotel hosting correspondents.
“Of course, all these revelations came as the crews were leaving Gaza,” Weekly Standard continued. “Otherwise, they’d have been expelled. As the director of foreign relations for Hamas’s information ministry explained, they keep close tabs on foreign journalists. Any who tried to ‘film the places from where missiles were launched … were deported from the Gaza Strip.’ ”
Whether Hamas overplayed its hand or the latest cease-fire left fewer heart-stopping images, the Foreign Press Association in Israel recently complained about “the blatant, incessant, forceful and unorthodox methods employed by the Hamas authorities and their representatives against visiting international journalists in Gaza over the past month.”
Meanwhile, American news media appear fascinated by the elevator security video of then-NFL star Ray Rice beating his female companion unconscious and dragging her like a sack of potatoes into a hallway. How many times did you look go to TMZ.com to watch Rice’s violence?
Curmudgeon Notes
• Do reporters really believe that prosecutor Joe Deters’ rant against Tracie Hunter — shortly before she went on trial on a nine-count indictment — was news? Whether her handling of a juvenile’s case led to two homicides may be relevant to her judgment but that’s not why she’s on trial. His fulmination was just another in the Deters “worst of the worst” tradition. What would happen if reporters ignored him when his outbursts have nothing to do with anything newsworthy?
Just as stupid was local news media reporting defense attorneys’ repeated assertions that Hunter’s prosecution is politically inspired. So what? If she’s guilty of any of the nine felonies, who cares whether she riled the white, male Republican court house gang? If she is acquitted, her supporters will have their chance for vengeance at the polls.
Reporting the assertion that something is politically motivated in so common — especially in the electoral Silly Season — that news judgment is suspect. Politics is how we get things done in our system. Even lies are constitutionally protected if they’re political speech. But how often do you read or hear a reporter let that retort pass without asking, “Yeah, but, are they right? Did you do it?”
Hunter was slapped down for barring reporters — and especially Enquirer’s Kimball Perry — before she was removed from the bench. Last week, when she went to trial on nine felony counts, Hunter’s defense team served Perry with a witness subpoena. Witnesses generally are not allowed to hear each other’s testimony. Had Judge Norbert Nadel enforced the subpoena, it would have prevented Perry from covering Hunter’s trial. The move was so transparent that Nadel told Hunter’s lawyers that they could call Perry but he could report the proceedings.
• I nominate Fox 19 for the Emmy for Sloth. The other night, in a report on street robberies around UC, the anchors talked about increased police patrols . . . with old video of cops in falling snow. Policing has changed in and around UC but fresh video was beyond the station’s abilities. Or maybe they think Fox fans won’t notice.
• In their relentless cheerleading for property developers, did The Enquirer ever talk to OTR residents about losing on-street parking to the streetcar or their apartments to gentrification? Or to planners at OKI about likely problems in getting a federal operating grant? Or anyone about the realities of operating costs?
• Most of the news media that I read, saw or heard celebrating the “Star Spangled Banner” bicentennial got it wrong. Francis Scott Key did not compose the song that became our national anthem in 1931. It was an old melody in 1814 when he wrote the poem that became the words we sing. For instance, NPR’s Frank DeFord sports commentator mistakenly referred to Key’s “stirring song” and “Mr. Key’s melody.”
• Editors at the Economist sort of withdrew a book review that raised “widespread criticism.” Yet, “in the interests of transparency the text remains available only on this special (online) page and appears below.” A non-withdrawal withdrawal?
The book is The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism by Edward Baptist. A key assertion is that slave-raised cotton was essential to national wealth in the pre-Civil War era. That wasn’t the problem. It was what The Economist’s reviewer wrote:
“Mr Baptist has not written an objective history of slavery. Almost all the blacks in his book are victims, almost all the whites villains. This is not history; it is advocacy.”
In their apology, Economist editors said, “There has been widespread criticism of this, and rightly so. Slavery was an evil system, in which the great majority of victims were blacks, and the great majority of whites involved in slavery were willing participants and beneficiaries of that evil.”
• An essential, routine element of accuracy is verification. This goes beyond checking with all sides in a controversy. Verification can warn a reporter when a source is full of baloney. Even when there’s no attempt to mislead, sources sometimes assert “facts” that aren’t facts. Lots of people honestly believe “facts” that aren’t demonstrable, provable, and irrefutable. With that in mind, here is a recent NPR internal memo:
On July 29, “Sports Illustrated’s Peter King writes on the MMQB blog that officials from the NFL and the Baltimore Ravens ‘have seen’ the surveillance video of Ray Rice punching his then-fiancée. The implication was that those officials had watched the tape and concluded that a two-game suspension was enough punishment for Rice.
On Sept. 8, “King writes that ‘earlier this summer a source I trusted told me he assumed the NFL had seen the damaging video that was released by TMZ on Monday morning of Rice slugging his then-fiancée. … The source said league officials had to have seen it. This source has been impeccable, and I believed the information. So I wrote that the league had seen the tape. I should have called the NFL for a comment, a lapse in reporting on my part. The league says it has not seen the tape, and I cannot refute that with certainty’.”
NPR continued, “As you’ve probably heard, the newly surfaced video has led the Ravens to cut Rice from the team and the NFL to suspend him indefinitely. King may have been right all along. But he can’t prove that.
“Let’s keep this simple. There’s nothing vague about the word ‘confirm.’ It means the person we’ve spoken to knows for a fact that something has happened. There’s no room for ‘I think so’ or ‘that’s what I hear’ or ‘they must have.’ In most cases we (NPR) require more than one such source — independent from the other — to confirm a key fact before we go with it.
“We do all this, as you know, because ‘when you assume, you make an ass out of u and me.’ ”
• Verdicts in the Oscar Pistorius trial badly rattled HuffingtonPost.com. Its botched headline read, “Pistorius Negligent But Not Guilty of Homocide.” Not guilty? Homocide?
The world class bladerunner was acquitted of murdering girlfriend Reeva Steenkamp for lack of premeditation but convicted of “culpable homicide” in her shooting death, South Africa’s equivalent of our manslaughter.
• Can robots write more interesting copy than bored reporters? Poynter.org says, “AP earnings-report stories written with automation technology have begun to appear. Earnings reports for Hasbro Inc., Honeywell International Inc. and GE, among others, bear the legend “This story was generated automatically by Automated Insights (http://automatedinsights.com/ap) using data from Zacks Investment Research.”
Poytner continued, “AP announced at the end of June that it would start using the technology to produce significantly more earnings report stories. … AP Managing Editor Lou Ferrara said the stories began to appear around the middle of July, and all the ones you’re seeing right now have been checked by human eyes, as was the plan. ‘The tap isn’t fully open yet,’ he said. Some stories were published just as Automated Insights filed them, others have had a few ‘bugs here and there.’ ”
“What I’m trying to get out of is the data processing business,” Ferrara told Poynter this summer. “I can’t have journalists spending a ton of time data processing stuff. Instead I need them reporting.”
• I’m not a believer in food supplements or fad diets, so this story appealed to me: Scientists at University College London — one of Britain’s finest institutions — tested eight probiotic drinks and found few or no health benefits. UCL asked whether claimed live bacteria were there, whether the bacteria survived stomach acid and whether the bacteria flourished in the small intestine.
One of the eight products passed all three UCL tests, according to study author Dr Simon Gaisford, of UCL’s School of Pharmacy, said: “Just swallowing them is no good if the stomach then kills everything.”
The Daily Mail said Align, Biobalance, Bio-Kult and Probio 7 failed every test. Yogurt drink Yakult contained enough bacteria but failed on the next two stages, while Actimel fell short on the number of bacteria surviving the stomach. “Only water-based barley drink Symprove passed all three challenges,” the paper and others reported. “Bacteria in the product VSL#3 survived the stomach and flourished in the small intestine. However, it contained fewer live bacteria than stated.”
CONTACT BEN L. KAUFMAN: letters@citybeat.com
This article appears in Sep 17-23, 2014.