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Photoshop Journalism

2010-03-09T14:45:00.010Z

Pictures are no doubt a great tool for journalists. For better and, I think for worse, society is now used to heavily visual modes of communication what with the advent of satellite uplinked, Hi-Def news broadcasts and internet connections fast enough to stream online news, load large pictures and embedded video. They can now be used to great effect – because nothing adds a bit of pizzazz to a story like actually being able to see the story. It can also be a hallmark of lazy journalism; pictures can be spectacularly ambiguous, and exploited to create a narrative that isn’t as true as the picture would indicate.

I’m reminded of a Daily Mail front page story from March 2009, written by Sue Reid, the headline screamed something like ‘MIGRANTS QUEUEING UP TO COME INTO BRITAIN’, and then beneath it had this huge picture of some asylum seekers in the Sangatte asylum centre in Calais queuing up.

Of course, if you read the tiny, tiny caption it turned out that in fact they were queuing up for food at the camp’s canteen building, and not waiting their turn to stowaway on the Eurostar. But not only are pictures used to essentially create stories, but as you shall see from today’s Daily Mail website, stories can also be used to create pictures.

It emerged this week that an incredibly brave soldier, Rifleman James Mckie of the 3^rd Battalion The Rifles threw back a Taleban handgrenade that had been lobbed onto the position of him two other comrades. It makes for an incredible story, and has been covered by BBC News, other British news outlets, such as The Times. Many of them used this picture of the 27 year old soldier, bloodied but calm, stoically staring down the lens:

The problem was, the picture was taken when all the action was over, and it seems just wasn’t dramatic enough for the Daily Mail to match the story of intense bravery. If only there was a picture of Rifleman McKie doing the sort of high octane daring do you see in war movies, you know, like that film The Hurt Locker that just won a load of Oscars. Gosh, that would be perfect. But in this technological age, that isn’t such a stretch and so some enterprising graphic designer at Mail HQ took this scene from The Hurt Locker (the fifth hit when you google images search 'the hurt locker') :

and with some digital jiggery pokery used the big explodey fireball as a more intense background, to make this picture of McKie, that was used today, March 9, 2010, on the Daily Mail website:

Wow, look at that guy, being all heroic whilst the desert goes Ka-Boom behind him. It's a pretty cheap trick, and the fact that the Daily Mail feel the need to make Rifleman McKie's actions anymore exciting is beyond me. Not only does it associate McKie's bravery with tabloid fakery, it's a lazy and misleading way to add sensationalism to a news story that really didn't need it.

Snow Business

2010-01-03T00:43:00.002Z

A miracle occurred over Christmas. Not bad, considering I’m an atheist. You see, two days before Christmas Day, it snowed where I live. And it stayed on the ground until Christmas Day. This was the first White Christmas I’d ever had. The bookmakers William Hill only actually pay out if it snows on Christmas Day, but whatever, don’t take it away from me. Because normally, I would be hard pressed to see what all the fuss is about. But not with snow. Just like Doctor Who, snow manages to bypass the cynical, grown up part of my brain and is for me, guiltlessly enjoyable. As a child, there was nothing better than waking up and seeing that ethereal pearlescent light shine through translucent bedroom curtains, which let me know that there was snow on the ground without even looking outside the window. Somehow, you just knew. Which was nothing compared to the joy of surveying the virgin snow, which could be rolled into snowmen, scooped into snowballs or simply just walked across, whilst one relished that hollow crunch of snow under welly boot. Lovely, and all during the Christmas holidays. Perfect.

But it wasn’t perfect, because not everybody sees it this way. In the lead up to the forecasted snowfall, quite a few of the newspapers might have well as simply printed a picture of a car stuck in 4 feet of snow accompanied by the headline PANIC!!!, the big black capitals a striking contrast to the wintry scene below. As fate would have it, I wasn’t at home at the time but out in Malvern – which is a little town about three miles from where I live, famous for mineral water and hills and not much else. In the alternate sane Britain, the other drivers would have just calmly driven in high gears at sensibly safe speeds. Easy. No, instead some people decided instead to PANIC!!! and it was at a stand still. I counted five abandoned cars. Malvern was like a low budget remake of The Day After Tomorrow. I should probably mention that this was in two centimeters of snow. That’s less than an inch. And I know that five abandoned cars doesn’t sound like a lot, but unlike a few centimeters of snow, a few cars left on the roads actually does block them pretty comprehensively. Instead of the usual route home, I was forced to do a hasty three point turn when this couple, a few cars in front of mine left their vehicle. They did so with that dumb animal panic in their eyes, the sort you see when a horse bolts its stable in a thunderstorm. But the difference is that when you’re a horse, its OK to be irrationally scared by the weather, because you’re horse.

In Berkshire, where it snowed (admittedly, slightly more heavily) a few days earlier, the police were removing abandoned cars and charging their owners to get them back, which at the time sounded really unfair. Like, the facist cops are totally out of order and stuff, yeah? By God did I now empathize with them. Whatever happened to that Open-as-Usual, Blitz Spirit which saw us plucky Brits cheerfully shrug our shoulders and carry on. I’m not going to say ‘What we need is another war’, partly because we have one in Iraq and one in Afghanistan and a third would just look greedy, and partly because only men start wars and men are crap at multitasking so it probably wouldn’t work out anyway. But part of it definitely is a national pride thing. A few centimeters of snow in Britain saw scores of trains cancelled. But they manage in other countries in far worse conditions. In Norway, they send out men with flame throwers to make sure that the points don’t freeze up on the railway, on account of the sub artic conditions that hammer the transport system for months at a time. Sure, conditions are tough but they manage, as they do in other cold climes like Canada or Russia. So come on people of Britain, get a grip. I hate saying that, because I’m aware that I sound like a whinging Daily Mail columnist complaining about how this country has gone to the dogs, what with them gay asylum seekers pushing up house prices and lowering our moral standards. But when instead of being needlessly stuck in a car when I could be at home enjoying a snowy Christmas, then my idiot tolerance plummets. I eventually made it home, after an hour and a half of U-turns and going the long way round. The next day, on Christmas Eve, I went sledging and all was right with the world.

Quick Release

2009-04-12T12:25:00.003+01:00

So this week Bob Quick, the Assistant Commissioner of the British Police Counter Terrorism Unit resigned after accidently flashing to camera details of an impending anti – terror operation, Operation Pathway which was to round up 11 no-goodnik al-qaeda types in the north of England. The big tease. As a result the operation was brought forward, and within hours of the security breach all arrests were made. And then, the day after the cock up, Jacqui Smith the Home Secretary (who knows a thing or two about wishing things had remained secret) said that the Home Office had no faith in Quick’s position, he resigned. Which lets face it, is fucking more than politicians do when they mess up. ‘PC CLOD’ was the headline The Sun went with, whilst the Daily Fail went with a trite criticism of the pension that Quick will receive (he did win the Queen’s Police Medal for Distinguished Service), and in an outraged aside, pointed out that his wife will continue to make money on her classic car rental business. Which has nothing to do with Quick resigning, but a women making money? Pah.

Still, what I liked the most was that apparently Britain has an actual CTU. Several in fact, one for each police force – look you can even find their Job Vacancies page here. For those of you who can’t stomach the fascistic/ultra-conservative/pro-torture/Fox TV Show 24 (in which all dusky middle eastern types are baddies apart from the token good ones that you suspect all along anyway because the show subtly tricks you into your own sort of racial profiling), CTU is the fictional Counter Terrorism Unit for the United States in which hunky, indestructible, and torture agent Jack Bauer (played by spell check molester Kiefer Sutherland) stops all kinds of terrorist nasty business from happening on Uncle Sam’s shores.

But in the fictional, American CTU everything is flashy, everyone is good looking, sometimes even the terrorists, and there is lots of shouting and guns and explosions and special effects and counter terrorism operations last, apparently, 24 hours (but then again the constant, shameless breaking of Human Rights Laws does tend to speed up investigations).

So I much prefer the real life CTU, and bumbling Bob Quick. Seeing the fallible but human side of those who have/had the unenviable job of protecting us, for some reason I feel a bit safer.

Former Nazi youth member said what?

2009-03-26T17:41:00.008Z

So strangely enough quite a few of you have been asking me what happened to my blog. I say quite a few of you, I mean four of you. Still. Anyway, here you go:

So the pope doesn’t understand how condoms work. Ah well. This first little gem of catholic dogma first became apparent to me a few years ago when some friends I had at the local convent school told me that they weren’t allowed to raise money for Comic Relief because part of what they do is fund contraception education in Africa – places that really need it because it is the continent that is home for some two thirds of all the people living with AIDS. It struck me as bat shit crazy then, and I still find it pretty bonkers. What is more immoral, using contraception or recommending people don’t use condoms in regions of the world where about 500% more people are living with HIV/AIDS than in Western Europe? I’ll leave that one hanging. So last week everyone’s favourite former Nazi Youth member Pope Benedict XVI said that "the traditional teaching of the Church has proven to be the only failsafe way to prevent the spread of HIV/Aids", and that condoms actually made the problem worse. Well I can't think of a better person to take sex advice from. In the same speech, he went onto identify saturated fat as a quick and cheap cure for heart disease. That last bit is a lie, but he bloody might has well have done for all its scientifically provable, medical incorrectness. In a country where one fifth of the population (over 85 million people) is Roman Catholic that is just a tad irresponsible. I see him as a bit like a really old relative set in his ways (Granddad just said what about asian people?), who you can’t just write off (he is family afterall), you still don’t take too much notice of, because like, he’s a bit out of touch. Similie exhausted? Next paragraph coming right up.

It seems like the Bishop of Rome waits before every major religious festival to come out with a typically medieval corker. A few days before Christmas he said something about how gays were destroying the rainforest – ok, he didn’t quite put it like that, he said that the blurring of the definition between man and woman was as big a threat to the world as deforestation was. I mention this because it is not all bad news, he is clearly mellowing. Look at this picture of the Pope with the President of Cameroon Paul Biya and his wife, Chantal.

Now I am not saying that Chantal is a tranny, but what I am saying is that she looks uncannily like 80s drag queen Divine.

Chantal

Divine

And on that bombshell, I don't really know what else to say.

Turning down a Free lunch

2009-02-03T23:15:00.009Z

This is going to be a difficult blog to write without a) sounding like an aching great bellend or b) insulting anyone, but I really don’t want to do either. So here we go.

Today in my pigeon hole I got a Free 09 booklet from the Inter Collegiate Christian Union. I think it was a copy of St Mark’s Gospel, but as will become apparent, I don’t really know my bible.

Basically, Free 09 is a week long…advert? Promotion? For Christianity. According to the flier, ‘Free is a week of events organised by Oxford Inter-Collegiate Christian Union to provide an opportunity to examine the claims of Christianity’. To me, that sounds like the most biased trial ever. Like letting Berlusconi investigate his own corruption charges. If it was done in concert with say, the Atheist Society, then that would be a proper examination of Christianity’s claims. But it’s not, and so it is safe to say the jury’s verdict will be foregone.

The only time I was tempted by the whole shebang was the promise of a Free meal – which is incidentally the only tangible benefit from going to one of these events.

A little hand written note in the front addressed to me contained the peachy line:

‘I don’t know how much you have thought about God and stuff’.

I think about stuff often, but God…never. I’m not going to get into reasons why I don’t –the how and the who and the why doesn’t really matter but suffice it say I don’t believe in God.

I felt really bad for whoever had taken the time to sit down and hand write a note to me, partly because I will inevitably take no notice, but also because all that time, effort and money (its quite a posh, well produced little thing) that went into disseminating this Christian propaganda could have gone towards say, sending aid to Gaza, or combating AIDS in Africa etc. Don’t give a free lunch to agnostic students, give it to the homeless, surely? Because that would have been a more constructive thing to do, ultimately have had a greater impact on the world.

But what I really, really resent the fact though, that somehow I am not a fulfilled being unless I believe in an imaginary friend. At best that is pretty smug, at worst disgustingly passive aggressive, when it comes down to it. Kind of like at school when a group of kids tease another kid by pretending they know a secret the lone kid doesn’t.

That is a pretty appropriate analogy, because this booklet had basically been given The Da Vinci Code make over. Like it’s all a big, centuries old secret that you are being let into. I want you to imagine that these lines are spoken by a movie voice over man:

‘A sinister plot’

‘A real life murder mystery’

‘A secret they’ve tried to silence’

Coming soon to a cinema near you?

The difference of course, between the bunch of teasing school kids is that the Christians believe they know something. They believe they are right. The thing about belief is that it is the same as thinking really. It just sounds more concrete. But a belief is just as prone to being bullshit as a thought is. I concede to you that everything I have to say is my opinion. I only wish Christians did the same.

And I’m going to stop myself right there, because I am not going to get all Dawkins on you, because I think he is a smug, self righteous sod when all is said and done. Let people do what they want, let people believe in who and what they want, and so long as it doesn’t hurt others then that is dandy. Just don’t foist your beliefs onto anyone else. But I refuse to be passive aggressively coerced into praying – like the booklet suggests – ‘Lord God, I’m sorry that I’ve been trying to live my life without you’. My life is just fine, actually how dare you suggest otherwise?

So basically, my outlook is a humanist one: live and let live. I don’t need to go to church or read the bible or believe in God to be a happy, fulfilled person, and neither do you – don’t let anyone tell you otherwise. Contrary to what the booklet in my pidge says, God cannot offer you ‘Freedom from death’. Nothing can. Yeah I get that it is a metaphor for heaven and what not. You can’t escape death, so live life to the full now. If you never know when or where the end will come, then that is a reason to be a good person, that is the reason to live a happy life.

Milk Soured

2009-02-02T02:36:00.007Z

So the other day I sat down to watch Milk, a great little film deserving of both your attention and Oscar’s. Although it climaxes on an awful tragedy - when Harvey Milk, the first gay man to be elected into public office in 70s San Francisco is murdered - what I took away was a sense of hope. Things can be changed for the better, in the face of almost overwhelming odds. Good will prevail and human rights can be fought for, won and protected.

And then I read Richard Littlejohn’s column from Friday’s Daily Mail – and if you’re a glutton for poisonous opinion reported as fact, then you can check it out for yourself here

The article starts with a flourishing hypothetical about a five-year-old boy and his four-year-old sister who have been kidnapped and how everyone would be outraged, and demanding their return.

But Littejohn has got you there! Because you see, this has really happened! The only difference, quite a big one mind you, is that said children were ‘taken by social workers, not paedophiles. So that’s all right, then.’

Actually, it kind of is, isn’t?

I feel sorry for social workers, they’ve had a rough time of it lately what with the Baby P scandal. The terrible mistakes of a few have meant that all social workers have been portrayed as lazy, inefficient baby murderers-by-proxy.

And now, it seems the Daily Mail is having its cake and eating it – because not only are they inefficient, apparently, but now they are evil and ‘Stalinist’, hyper organized child snatchers. This hyperbolic reference, in an idiotic instance manages to a) cheapen the memory of the 11 million plus who died under Stalin’s communist regime and b) insult all the social workers who do a difficult job well. Oh and c) blow the whole damn thing out proportion. Obviously, I don’t know much about this case, (then again, neither does Littlejohn) but I am guessing that the social workers had their reasons. So leave them alone.

But the real crux of Littlejohn’s outrage comes from the fact that these kids, whose mother is a heroin addict, were adopted by a gay couple, instead of their ageing, infirm grandparents.

But don’t worry. Perhaps I’m being unfair, because as Littlejohn assures us he is not being homophobic like you thought: ‘I’ve always supported equality for gays in terms of housing, employment and civil partnerships.This little Trojan horse of tolerance is the gay equivalent of starting a statement with ‘I’m not racist, but…’

Of course, by now Littlejohn has got it in our little hate filled head boxes the blurry distinction made between paedos and social workers and now he adds queers into the equation. As bigotry masked with moral concern, I grudgingly admit, it’s a beauty. The article really hits its peak when he goes onto attack the ‘homosexual lobby who rigidly enforces the gay ‘rights’ agenda’. Yeah stupid gays, wanting equality.

Gay rights are placed in inverted commas, Littlejohn’s little wink-wink nudge-nudge to the discerning bigot/reader that these so called rights are fictive, illusory and insubstantial – in short, they are not rights at all, in the same way that you imagine some war lord having a jolly good chuckle about the European Court and their silly championing of human ‘rights’, whilst making little inverted commas in the air with his ring and index finger crooked. Unfortunately, cynical deployment of punctuation does not make something real magically un-exist.

It would be almost kind of funny if readers didn’t inhale this noxious rubbish and agree with it all. Check out the reader’s comments at your leisure: for now here are some of my favourites:

‘All we ever hear about is the rights of women and gays rights!’

‘Marxists walk all over us!’

‘Left-wingers are only interested in destroying families’

‘Bring back slavery!’

These all genuinely appear on the Daily Mail website, accept the last one which I made up, but the comments are all so crazy that it might as well be true, with violent assertions of the earth’s flatness.

I also saw this week another period film tipped for Oscar success, Revolutionary Road staring Kate Winslet and Leo DiCaprio. I haven’t really got much to say about it, accept that it is set in the 1950s and is incredibly depressing. A lot like Richard Littlejohn’s views.

For Skins

2009-01-25T15:10:00.003Z

So last Thursday saw the return of Skins, you know, the programme that shows you what teenage life is really like.. For those of you who were living out your own youth instead of watching what some 35 year old in TV land thinks your youth is like then here is a little a quick catch up of the new Skins gang.

‘Cook is a fucking geezer’ garbled some spotty kid on a fanpage. No he is not, he is pretty much everyone you hated at school rolled into one. Somehow making him ‘charismatic’ according to the E4 website. A fucking cock, more like.

He is perhaps the most dislikable TV character ever, who nevertheless has friends who in real life would never, ever hang out with him. So we have Freddie the HOT one, (who incidentally is about 5 years too old for that skateboard that nearly caused a car crash in the first three minutes. No doubt he’ll have all the girls and some of the boys swooning after him, but my first reaction was ‘prick!’) Then there is Pandora the IRRITATING VIRGIN one (wonder who’ll open up her box? Geddit?!), Naomi, the MIGHT-BE-A-LESBIAN one, (incidentally the only character who is remotely likeable/interesting), JJ, the ZANY POSH MAGICIAN ONE, (no really) Effy the MANIPULATIVE PROMISCUOUS one. The characters are all so 2-D it’s like watching a cartoon: one poor girl even has an actual EVIL TWIN for fucks sake.

As anyone who saw the last two series will know, Skins always tries to be hip and zeitgeisty, and like, real, man, yeah? So expect story lines from Broken Britain about drugs, knife crime, immigrants, ASBOs etc, with healthy lashings of barely legal tits and arse to keep up, amongst other things, your interest. In that way, it is a bit like the Daily Mail on TV minus the prejudice. Depressingly, it will probably be huge.