How the Enemy Uses - And Is - The Media

Our enemies are barbarians and evil, but they are not unsophisticated. They know how to plan their attacks for sympathetic cameras, including many western press outlets. And more, they know those media people are sympathetic to them.

Here's the latest in western media being used for Jihadist propaganda:

Many, including grisly images from the Qana tragedy, clearly are posed for maximum dramatic effect. There is an entire series of photos of children's stuffed toys poised atop mounds of rubble. All are miraculously pristinely clean and apparently untouched by the devastation they purportedly survived. (Reuters might want to check its freelancers' expenses for unexplained Toys R Us purchases.) In some cases, the bloggers seem to have uncovered the same photographer using more than one identity. There's an improbable photo by Hajj of a Koran burning atop the rubble of a building supposedly destroyed by an Israeli aircraft hours before. Nothing else in sight is alight. (With photos, as in life, when something seems too perfect to be true, it's almost always because it is.) In other photos, the same wrecked building is portrayed multiple times with the same older woman -- one supposes she ought to be called a model -- either lamenting its destruction or passing by in different costumes. . . .

Here's more.

Much has already been said about Hajj and his doctored photos, and they have been purged from Reuters' servers. But it's not the obvious photoshopping that worries me. It's not even the brazenness with which they publish the obviously photoshopped pics - although that's troublesome all by itself.

The worst propaganda are the undoctored or even unstaged photos, that convey a completely false sense of the event being covered. It doesn't even take fakery. Clever editing and cropping can do it all. Consider this example from a protest last year, where this fairly innocent picture (above) was all that was shown at this pro-Palestinian, Communist run rally in San Francisco:

Complete details on the SF rally and the San Francisco Chronicle's coverage of it.

I wrote a few days ago about the need to not just read the news, but know how to read the news. Same goes for pictures as well. As long as the MSM in this country is more interested in undermining Bush than in keeping Americans safe from the threats we face, vigilance is the key to protecting ourselves from anti-American propaganda - both foreign and domestic.