Watch this space: Robert Capa

I scarcely think it’s “wingnutty” to be concerned about the news media feeding us falsified evidence. Even it if IS ‘fake but accurate’, it’s not the sort of habit we want them to cultivate.

Did anyone read Errol Morris’ multipart essay on the Valley of Death photo? Now there’s an example of obsessive.
http://morris.blogs.nytimes.com/tag/cannonballs/

There’s no point in linking to the shite, but the people of whom CB speaks were hard at work on the circumstances of the death of Fadel Shana, a 23 year old Reuters cameraman killed in Gaza this week by an Israeli missile. The allegation seemed to some combination of “he must have been with Hamas” and “he must have staged some photos so it doesn’t count even if it was the Israelis”.

I was always sort of suspicious myself.

Where the picture is a form of artistic expression authenticity is irrelevant, and where it’s a documentary evidence, it is, of course, vital. And where it’s used as a mode of communication, it’s desirable, but not required.

There was a lot of evidence that Bush’s Vietnam-era service was deficient, even without the faked letter. The hooplah over the faked letter allowed people to ignore the other evidence (as well as the lack of positive evidence that he was there — e.g., people who remember him.) The provenence of the faked letter is still unknown — it came to the newspeople through an unidentified intermediary — and you have to ask whether it was a plant by the Republicans. The Republican message machine responded instantly, and again you have to wonder if they were tipped off.

Just now Karl Rove delivered a long letter to a an MSNBC crew investigating his role in the Siegelman framing. He attacks the credibility of one of the witnesses against him, the Republican Jill Sampson.

It’s a very detailed letter and most of it is presumably smokescreen and psych, but I’m asking myself whether or not Sampson might be some kind of plant too, and that at some point Rove plans to destroy the media case against him by destroying the most publicly visible part of the case.

And while some of the postmodern discussions on these matters are quite interesting, I think that when it comes down to it accuracy in journalism is a rather simple concept.

Except… Challenging the authenticity of an image as a diversionary tactic, and overstating any arbitrary or tenuous evidence available for your basis, serves to dilute “authenticity” (or accuracy). It’s counterproductive, although it serves the challenger’s intent to muddy the waters and muddle the audience’s understanding of what they see and hear.

Similarly, authenticity of ownership is fairly important: “people should not steal from each other” is also a rather simple concept. But suppose I go on TV and accuse various people of having stolen their clothes, and as evidence I say they don’t have their receipts anywhere and nobody remembers them making the purchase and so on.

That kind of “challenge” would confuse the audience and plant unreasonable ideas in their heads (…maybe so-and-so really did steal that sweater…) I could claim, “but I am just defending the simple concept that people should purchase their clothing rather than steal it!”

But am I really doing any such thing? You probably can’t prove outright that I am making false accusations, but my behavior should seem suspicious to you.

Likewise, many accusations that right-wingers have directed at media images (“it’s probably fake!”) seem suspicious on their face. Concrete example: I remember clicking through a couple links deep from Instapundit to find some blogger writing that the Downing Street Memo was “probably just another forgery.”

This kind of accusation, with dissemination and frequency over time, actively destroys the public’s ability to trust the media.

Summary point: criticizing these alleged “media critics” is not a post-modern academic exercise. Their questionable (and questionably motivated) accusations deserve just as much scrutiny as journalists and public figures do.

It looks like this one will never go away. The authenticity of the photo has been established several times; in English, Richard Whelan’s extensive investigation of the Capa photo resulted in pretty convincing conclusions that the photo is not faked, convincing, that is, to nearly everybody but Phillip Knightly, who originally claimed that is was fake and, AFAIK, continues to do so with no compelling evidence (if he has changed his mind on this I would love for someone to let me know). Whelan relied on a book self-published in Spain in the 1990s that identified the soldier as a 24-year-old Republican volunteer named Federico Borrel García. The story has received the expected coverage in the photographic press; see American Photographer, May/June 1998; and Aperture, 166 Spring 2002. At this point the issue seems closed, unless the negatives show several versions of this scene, or show the same soldier still alive in a later image on the same roll.

The Spanish Civil War was a big fake to begin with. Nothing more than a bunch of Hollywood extras running around the sand dunes north of Ventura CA, pretending to fight fascism, but actually on the payroll of pinko-sympathizing leftist East-European studio heads.
Later the commies tried to paint it as another glaring example of the hypocrisy and treachery of the capitalist ruling classes – the way some of the bravest and most heroic men and women of the time were left strategically hanging in the wind, encouraged by false promises of aid and support which never came, while Fascism’s seven-league boots got spit-shined with the blood of martyrs.
All a pack of lies. Never happened.
Capa spent the whole time in his darkroom in Brooklyn, making up stories and illustrating them with fake images.

I believe it’s fairly well shown that Brady and possibly other photographers rearranged the bodies for some of their shots of the Gettysburg battelfield. Whether that’s faking I have no idea. And the film of the Somme shown for home consumption was definitely (and I think quite ineptly) faked. In one of Buchan’s WWI novels (I think Mr. Standfast, but maybe Greenmantle)there is a scene where Richard Hannay, who is genuinely being chased by German agents, takes refuge in a propaganda documentary that is being filmed to replicate the real war.

@19 – I refreshed my memory a bit on this matter and to be precise there were two claims made about the authenticity/significance of the “cheering Palestinians”. The first one was made by a Brazilian media student who claimed that CNN was using old footage from 1991. This was initially covered by indymedia but debunked rather quickly. The second one was made by a journalist of the German TV program Panorama, who had seen the whole unedited AP/Reuters footage and claimed that the footage was edited and framed to give the misleading impression that the whole town was dancing on the streets celebrating 9/11. In reality it was small groups of people celebrating something, but it wasn’t clear from the footage that their joy was related to the attacks. Also a Palestinian woman who featured prominently in the footage claimed she was bribed to cheer in front of the camera and that she deplored the 9/11 attacks. The article is still online here, but only in German. The accompanying video which bolstered these claims seems to be offline unfortunately.

Be that as it may, I’m sure that if Iran nuked Israel a reporter could find, say, a couple of hundred neo-Nazis in Germany, Austria, Poland or wherever who would celebrate such an act – but that wouldn’t really say much about how the population of these countries felt about the issue. Yet the “cheering Palestinians on TV” still feature prominently in the collective memory of some Americans and will have influenced their stance towards the Palestinians as a whole.

@14 I’m for scrutinizing both the media and its critics, but you don’t really need any elaborate theories to do that, indeed, while they might be interesting on philosophical or artistic level, they can be counterproductive on a pratical and political level, since they tend to blur the issues at hand. All that is needed is a bit of basic media competency, journalistic ethics and common sense.

Finally, the truth is out! Turns out nobody died in the Spanish Civil War.

Everyone knows Guernica is about the poor dental care available in Spain at the time.