Shattered Lens: Part 5 – Bring Out Your Dead
February 24, 2011 17:04 by Simon PloskerIn a conflict as volatile as that between Israel and the Palestinians, pictures of the dead, injured and grieving are inevitable. During the three month study period, a number of Israeli military operations took place in response to terrorist actions from Gaza. All of the images reviewed below concern members of Palestinian terror organizations killed by the IDF.
Despite this, the wire services habitually portray these terrorists as ordinary Palestinians who fell victim to IDF brutality, a theme that the terrorist organizations are only too happy to encourage.
In contrast, Israel does not allow press photographers to take pictures of dead or wounded soldiers or civilians at the scene of an event or in hospitals or morgues unless the photographers happen to be at the scene before the arrival of the emergency services. Even then, editors exercise a level of responsibility over what to publish. Images of Israeli suffering are therefore far less prominent. In the case below, notice how the images from Reuters and AP present a picture of mass grief:
Palestinians carry the body of militant Bassam Badwan during his funeral in Gaza City June 29, 2010. An Israeli air strike on the Gaza Strip on Monday killed at least one Palestinian militant, Badwan, and wounded two other people, medical workers said. An Israeli army spokeswoman said a military aircraft had “targeted a Palestinian who fired a rocket-propelled grenade at soldiers” that struck inside Israel. (Reuters)
Palestinian mourners carry the body of Bassam Badwan, a militant from the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP), out of his family house during his funeral in Gaza City, Tuesday, June 29, 2010. Badwan was killed Monday in an Israeli airstrike in Gaza. (AP/Khalil Hamra)
Take a look, however, at this image from Getty taken with a wider angle and a different caption:
Press photographers crowd around Palestinian mourners carrying the body of Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine (PFLP) militant Bassam Badwun duirng his funeral in Gaza City on June 29, 2010 after being shot dead by Israeli forces. (Getty)
Notice how many of the outstretched hands belong to photographers and how the use of cropping and angles is used by Reuters and AP to increase the dramatic perception of the funeral.
Read the whole of the Shattered Lens series:
CLICK HERE TO RETURN TO THE SHATTERED LENS INTRODUCTION
CLICK HERE TO VIEW PART 1 - THE GAZA FLOTILLA
CLICK HERE TO VIEW PART 4 – LIGHTING CANDLES, INFLAMING BIAS
CLICK HERE TO VIEW PART 6 – PHOTO BIAS IN DEPICTIONS OF THE IDF
Brent Pudsey
1:37 am
Feb 25, 2011
Israel should be applauded for her humane treatment of the victims of war and bloodshed. Photographers and journalists should not be allowed to gawk wildly at this tragedy. In Winnipeg , Manitoba Canada there was a hotly debated exhibit called Bodies from China. The controversy was that the Chineese government used really dead bodies for this display and that this was vulgar and disrespectful of human life. How much so is it for photographers and journalists to rush into these tragic enviroments as vultures gorging on the remains of corposes.
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Barbara Stone
10:42 am
Feb 25, 2011
If a picture is worth a thousand words, those cropped and biasly-captioned ones from Gaza conceal a thousand lies. It’s about time each contained a health warning – i.e. ‘This image was obtained only with the approval of Hamas’
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Gerald Lynch
1:22 pm
Feb 25, 2011
Journalists? They are not journalists but poorly disguised propagandist for corrupt Islamist and corporatist media. Honesty and integrity in reporting is almost completely absent in today’s media blitz against Israel and Israelis. Seldom if ever has any nation been the target of such continuous distortions palmed off as reportage of ME events. I applaud the restraint shown by Israeli media and politicians, which must be near impossible to ignore at times. The blatant disregard for facts by the propagandist whom forever shield the Islamists from genuine investigative inquiry while timelessly belittle Israel with distortions and downright lies, does a horrible dis-service to the many fine and real journalist who preceded todays lot of sycophantically slanted scribblers. There was a time when one could accept a fair percentage of reporting of world events as reasonably accurate, sadly that time seems long gone. The main reason I don’t waste money on news??papers. Included in the above of course is the totally corrupt institution hilariously name United Nations. Never has a name been so mis-applied. The one solace in all this is that this has been prophesied in the greatest book ever written and published, the Holy Bible, the book Israelites gave to the world, and the world will one day bless them for it.
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Berner
8:21 pm
Mar 03, 2011
The press is heavily invested in selling the “Palestinian” narrative. Anything that gets in the way of that gets cropped out, omitted or pushed aside.
If anyone in the region actually deserves a state of their own it is the Kurds, a real, existing nation with its own culture, language and religious identity.
Your so called “Palestinians” are nothing but a bunch of Egyptians and Syrians (Arabs) that since the 1960s have been selling themselves as a new nation. They even claim to be related to the ancient Philistines, a joke with no roots in reality.
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Mark Ira Kaufman
4:42 am
Mar 04, 2011
The finest examination of the glaring imbalance in coverage of the conflict and the reasons behind that imbalance is Stephanie Gutmann’s 2005 book, “The Other War: Israelis, Palestinians and the Struggle for Media Supremacy.”
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