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All the photos in the article make it look like reporters outnumbered rebels three to one. But, then, it is a Daily Mail article, so they could be taking the piss.

I don’t trust the Mail, but their tabloidy approach means they’ll run photos like this when, say, the Gray Lady wouldn’t.

RPG. Doo-dahs are bigger

Let us pause to remember the hilarity that was Flat Fatima.

Well there goes your chances of being invited to the “right” parties right down the loo…

Tsk, tsk…

Do they have the little signs pointing out the best spots to take pictures from like they do at Disney World?

Weep or go postal? Decisions, decisions…

Oh, fie – those last two were from me.

Anyway, one thing this brings to mind is those scenes (I think there were two) from the movie “The Right Stuff” of the reporters swarming to a background noise of good old Nikon F motor drives, which sounded remarkably like what one would expect a truly Biblical swarm of locusts would sound like as they descended upon your fields to destroy them utterly.

Sorry, but recent and continuing events have not left me in my “happy place.” For about the last decade or two.

It’s about supporting Obama’s stupidity, by making the most of this (probably) short-lived rebellion.

How I used to envy those motor drives…

I’ve never read it, but there is a book by Phillip Knightley titled “The First Casualty: the War Correspondent as Hero and Myth-Maker from the Crimea to ___” It was first published in 1975, when the blank read “Kosovo”: I see that on the 2004 edition it said “Iraq.” My parents read it and liked it. . .anyway, I think the title and subtitle kinda sums it up. And not just for war journalists. Just as law enforcement sting operations sometimes seem to edge dangerously close to entrapment, so do investigative journalists frequently seem to be skirting the boundary between actual and manufactured news.

huh, same general category as a afghani tribesman with a ipod… doesnt make any DAMN sense….. THEIR DOING IT WRONG!

Hey, what ELSE would one expect from ABCNNBCBS and their dead-tree fellow travelers?

I have a killer shot of an event in Israel with a weeping woman at the palestinian restraining wall, with 831927 cameramen pointed at her, and a little boy standing back a ways giggling at the sight. It tells the tale pretty starkly.

I find it hilarious that millions of innocent people have died in various muslim countries invaded by the USA on stories they just made up!

I find the deaths of millions of innocent humans based on known lies supported by brain washed nationalists and phony national security threats really funny.

When you mentioned “Flat Fatima” my first thought was that it was some kind of reference to Rachel Corrie.

I bet Oceania absolutely pissed himself laughing over that one.

GB, PLEASE don’t get Oceania/Flashheart started on that subject, or we are going to be getting endless cracks about the Rachel Corrie special at IHOP, or at nutrasystems, et al….

I think that we should invite SCA over here with his Corrie pic collection ….

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“Truthy” photojournalism is a longstanding tradition– older than the MFM itself.

Yeah, haven’t they worked out that Mathew Brady — the father of photojournalism — dragged corpses around and posed live soldiers on the ground to make the American Civil War more photogenic?

It still sucks.

Ubiquitous, real-time or near-real-time images and video are, and will continue to be, one of those things like printing and steam engines — huge unforeseen consequences.

What were the guys who first put a camera on a cell phone thinking? I don’t know which is more boggling: the idea that they had no idea where it would lead, or that they did.

Regards,
Ric

In a similar vein, I also look askance at the reportage that the downed US Airmen were greeted as heroes by the locals. I call BS. Beck last week reported that Muammar G’daffy told Geo. Soros he was down with George’s “Open Society” and wanted to be seen as a friend of the U.S.

Soros AND Cass Sunstein recommended a Boston PR firm who specialize in rehabilitating the images of countries! This nugget about locals all of a sudden loving fighters from The Great Satan, sounds quite PRish.

Actually Catapillars are still a US product. Interestingly enough, back in the early 90’s they stood up and faced down their unions and forced them into a sustainable agreement. This, at the same time GM was buying peace with the UAW. Catapillar has done very well (you should see their new hybrid bulldozers) while GM – Not so much.

You’re absolutely right, Ric. Witness the latest images out of Japan.

It’s not entirely a good thing. People are terribly, terribly reactive to pictures. So they may accept that war involves death, but gory pictures make them hyperventilate.

If you think the truth trumps everything, then why don’t we illustrate articles about life-saving surgeries with images of bloody sponges, scalpels cutting into flesh and huge incision scars?

Reminds me of the media-swarm at Ward Churchill’s post-firing drum-circle.*

* Me, shamelessly link-whoring for a fifth of a century.

Oceania? Aren’t we at war with them? Haven’t we always been at war with them?

If I recall my 1984 geography correctly, we are them.

So we are the enemy?

Cool.

I wouldn’t want to be the guy taking that photo. If Muj on the right lets fly with that thing, he’s in the backblast area (although that’s not as big a problem with an RPG7 – which is what this looks like – than with some other anti-armour weapons because it’s a two stage propulsion system.) And the guy carrying the reload should not be exposing himself to counterfire like that.

So yeah, totally staged.

Yep, it’s East Asia we Oceanians are always bickering with.

Those fucking Eastasians. They’re ruining it for the rest of us.

Stoaty – it was Alexander Gardner who dragged a rebel corpse across a field to the Devil’s Den and put a gun next to him for a ‘sniper’ shot. He used the same gun as a prop in a few pictures. You can see the same body in another picture in the original position.

Brady was even phonier. He bought the photos that Gardner and other stringers did and sold them under his name. Brady was a studio photographer for pretty much the whole war.

“Mathew Brady — the father of photojournalism”

Er … Carol Szathmari? William Simpson? Roger Fenton?

Mathew Brady — the father of AMERICAN photojournalism.

Waaaaait a second — there are places other than America?

Speaking of photos, I loved this: Fifty unexplainable photos.

reminds me of the attention whore cindysheehan and her photo ops…..when the camera’s out numbered her supporters by 5+ to one……..