UPDATE: After HonestReporting was in contact with the editors, The Independent removed the problematic video.
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There’s nothing more pernicious than the charge that Israel deliberately targets Palestinian children. It’s something that the Palestinians and Israel-haters want the world to believe. But if you can’t supply a dead child’s body, you need to produce imagery that will suggest that a child was a victim of Israel. That’s where Fauxtography comes in.
One way to do this is through the deliberate staging of photos or footage, something that HonestReporting looked at in our Shattered Lens study of Photo Bias. So, for example, the deliberate placement of children’s toys at the scene of an Israeli air strike has been a favored ploy.
A piece in The Independent on the financial plight of UNRWA includes an accompanying and barely related video shot by correspondent Bel Trew in Gaza from the scene of what was presumably an Israeli air strike. There is no commentary, no subtitling and no context.
Amidst the rubble, most of which is concrete, one thing catches the eye – what appears to be a purple piece of furniture, most likely a girl’s. A Palestinian man holds up a child’s bright pink t-shirt.
The man is addressing a few people but we don’t know who he is or what he is saying. We also don’t know the exact location. It’s possible to make out a photo lens, indicating that this is a group of journalists who have been specifically brought to the scene for an arranged briefing. Such a media briefing would be unlikely to be held without Hamas oversight.
Has that purple piece of children’s furniture been deliberately placed there for the benefit of the photographers? And how does the pink t-shirt look like it has just returned from the launderette?
Either way, the imagery presents a child as a victim of an Israeli air strike. In light of the absent context, we can only guess at what the circumstances are but without the context, viewers of The Independent’s video, already an audience predisposed to anti-Israel feeling, will draw their own emotional conclusions – Israel, the child killer.
If this is indeed a case of fauxtography on the part of the Palestinians, it has achieved its purpose. And even if it isn’t, The Independent has behaved in such an unprofessional manner to use a video and allow viewers to guess what happened.
