Posts Tagged ‘media’

I suppose I ought to follow up my previous posts with a comment on the election result.

Sadly the Lib Dems didn’t manage to unseat the Labour MP here, so Dulwich residents are going to be suffering from another four years of Irritable Jowell Syndrome. Her majority did go down by about 4,000, mostly in favour of the Lib Dems, but it still wasn’t close enough for me to feel guilty about voting Green. Around here, the Green candidate received 6.5 per cent of votes, and increase of 1.5%.

This election did nothing to restore my faith in this country’s so-called democracy; despite winning no more than 35 per cent of votes, Labour was still able to secure a comfortable majority of 67. Only 20 per cent of eligible voters voted Labour — the lowest figure in modern times — yet they’re allowed to run the country (in fact more people chose not to vote than actually voted for this government). Not to mention the 39 police investigations into allegations of postal ballot fraud. Clearly less keen on democracy at home than abroad… do as we say, not as we do.

The media must take a lot of the blame for the situation though. They consitently failed to raise many important issues, and tended to pose the most light-weight questions to the politicians. Paxman v Blair was pathetic (and Paxman’s Galloway interview made him look like a sad parody of himself worthy of Chris Morris). John Pilger’s written a good piece on this for the New Statesman:

The media coverage of this past election was a pastiche. Our right to know what our rulers are doing to people the world over is being lost in the new propaganda consensus.

And of course no sooner are Nu Labour back in power than they’re up to their old tricks. First Mandelson, now Blunkett…. Why do they call it a resignation? If a minister has done something that warrants resigning over, why should they be allowed back into government a few months later? That’s not resigning, that’s keeping your head down until the storm blows over and the media move on to another story. In other words, a bit of a holiday. Not even an unpaid holiday in Blunkett’s case — Blair allowed him to keep his grace-and-favour London residence and ministerial Jag.

In fact, since being forced to resign, Blunket has reportedly made £70,000 from extra-parliamentary work. This includes ignoring anti-sleaze guidelines and taking a job with Indepen Consulting Ltd, receiving between £15-20,000 from them. The company helps its clients develop a “relationship” with government; clients include Anglian Water, South West Trains, Thames Water, MM02 and T Mobile. Looks like I’m going to have to get my Blunkett Voodoo Doll out again.

On Monday, March 31, the Los Angeles Times published a front-page photograph of US soldiers holding a large group of Iraqis prisoner. The paper later discovered that the photograph had been altered by the photographer — he had composited two similar photographs to improve the composition — before sending them to the paper. Although the manipulation hadn’t radically altered the meaning of the pictures, the LA Times felt this violated their editorial policy, and sacked the photographer, Brian Walski. The paper’s editor published an explanation, showing the 2 original photos and the composite. Good for him – in an age when the media are constantly competing to come up with the most powerful images with which to woo the public, it’s reassuring to see such a principled stance. Sure, it’s unfortunate for Mr Walski, whose intentions were probably perfectly innocent, but with Photoshop’s power to distort images (literally and figuratively) I think it’s vital for the public to be able to trust news photos. As the National Union of Journalists puts it, ‘If the credibility of news photography is to be maintained, then manipulated “non-photos” must be marked as such.’

I don’t expect such principles from London’s Evening Standard though. On Wednesday April 9th the paper’s front page displayed a large photo of celebrating Iraqis, with the headline ‘Jubilation on the streets of Baghdad FREEDOM’. Well, sharp-eyed Simone Moore spotted that this photograph had been doctored — you can see the altered Evening Standard image at IndyMedia.

The photo is a still taken from BBC News 24. This massive image has been very obviously doctored in a programme such as Photoshop. The image features a massive crowd of Iraqi’s celebrating in the streets, HOWEVER in the mid and background it is possible to see how numerous photo’s have been cut and pasted together to create the illusion of there being a massive crowd present.

When you examine the photograph carefully, it’s clearly a composite of several shots. Now the Standard’s picture desk is apparently claiming it was only altered to remove the BBC logo, but to me this seems like the thin end of the wedge. Admittedly, there’s a fine line between between enhancing (a bit of dodging & burning, tweaking the curves, or unsharp masking) and manipulating (combining multiple photos, cloning parts of an image), but given the political significance of this particular scene, I think the Standard has crossed the line.

Hypothetically, if you have a photo of ten people, but you alter it to make it appear that 500 people are present, that would clearly be a distortion of the truth. The same goes for ten people made to look like 12. The numbers and motive are irrelevant; you’re deliberately making significant alterations to the image, and it becomes an illustration rather than an accurate record. (For more on the ethical/practical dilemmas, see If you Mac it, mark it!

In this instance, we have a newspaper manipulating photos to produce a composite picture that could be seen as vindicating its pro-war editorial line. But if it was the Independent altering a photo to support its anti-war stance, I’d still feel the same – it’s clearly wrong. And the Press Complaints Commission Code of Practice would seem to support me on this:

Accuracy
i) Newspapers and periodicals must take care not to publish inaccurate, misleading or distorted material including pictures.

As would the National Union of Journalists’ Code of Conduct:

No journalist shall knowingly cause or allow the publication or broadcast of a photograph that has been manipulated unless that photograph is clearly labelled as such. Manipulation does not include normal dodging, burning, colour balancing, spotting, contrast adjustment, cropping and obvious masking for legal or safety reasons.

Maybe I should stop ranting here and actually complain to the PCC…

Arabic broadcaster al-Jazeera launched its new english-language service on Monday, at english.aljazeera.net. I’ve been trying to get to it all day, in order to read about the war from a different perspective, but without joy. Apparently they’ve been subjected to a spate of DoS attacks (no prizes for guessing which freedom of speech-loving country the attacks originated from…) which have brought down their site.

Additionally, the US hosting service that runs the English-language site — DataPipe, a brand name of Hoboken Web Services — buckled under pressure and agreed not to host the al-Jazeera site from the end of this month. ‘Land of the Free’ my arse.

Elsewhere at Guardian Online, Ben Hammersley thinks the net has come of age as a news source: “In the end, the biggest winner, of the war and the peace, may be Google.” Ben’s own blog is amongst those in my bookmarks.

The Guardian also has an interesting article on a ‘location-enhanced’ web, including mentions of the London Bloggers tube map and GeoURL (both of which contain entries for World of Badger).

Steve Bell’s latest cartoon is about Blair’s message to the Iraqi people.

Not at the Guardian, George Lakoff, a Professor of Linguistics at the University of California, takes a look at the metaphorical ideas being used to justify Gulf War II.

You know blogging’s passé when evil tyrants start to get in on it — now you can read Hussein’s musings in Saddam’s Cyber Palace.

Holy crap, just popped along to check out the news headlines, and discovered that I was shortlisted (Top 30)for the Guardian’s Best British blog competition! I knew Simon had entered me for it, but didn’t really give it any thought. Wish I had now — there were cash prizes for the top 6 — wouldn’t have let it stagnate through most of July and August either (and I’d have certainly cleaned up my markup and stylesheets). Haven’t had a chance to check out the other 29 blogs yet (having just discovered this after working on a Flash project until 4am); the only other one I recognise is the excellent Exploding Fist. Thinking about it, if World of Badger made it into the top 30, what on earth were the 270 blogs that didn’t make it like?

Still, this does fit in nicely with my plan for blanket media coverage… first I get slagged off by an ex-girlfriend’s mother on BBC’s Kilroy, and now I’m mentioned on the Guardian’s website. I think step three will be getting myself on the cover of the Daily Mail within the next year, followed soon after by a Chris Morris Brasseye special about me.

Hmmm, better get some new fluff up here in the morning in case anyone actually visits… in the meantime, to anyone visiting for the first time, you can browse my previous ramblings (backblog?) using the pink arrows at the bottom of this page.