“Even though the pictures are side by side, there’s a kind of aesthetic balance, not necessarily an ideological one,” Mr. Stengel said. “It’s not about taking sides, but about the terrible poignancy for people on both sides.”Aesthetics. And there you go. (Not to be too hard on Reuters, Stengel works for Time.)
Look. There are pictures of wars painted on the walls of caves. The urge to illustrate war is timeless. And illustrations are more than just facts. They convey emotion and point of view, photographs more than most for their immediacy and presumed realism. Look at the photos from the Crimean War - probably the first war ever seriously photographed - or the U.S Civil War. Look at Robert Capa's photos from Normandy. Look at Vietnam.
Nobody expects the cave paintings to be journalistically accurate, and if you expect it from the pictures you see on TV you're nuts. There are 48.7 bazillion ways TV stories, intentionally or not, depart from reality.
None of which is to apologize for Reuters or, more to the point, for the photographer who supplied the doctored photos (apparently he altered two). It's just no surprise, is all, and nothing to dissolve over. Photojournalism has always had a lot of “if” in it (read Flags of Our Fathers for one well-known example). The advent of digital cameras, laptop computers, and satellite uplinks make it iffier. I doubt if there's a war photographer working today that hasn't “photoshopped” a photo, if only to the extent of cropping it or punching up the focus a little or maybe, just maybe, a wee bit of retouching on the General's nose. It's unrealistic to think otherwise and even more unrealistic to think photo editors will catch every tweak, much less care.
We do need ethical photographers, and ethical editors, and ethical writers, and ethical anchorbimbos on TV (don't hold your breath on that last one, I'm just saying here). But most of all we need intelligent consumers of news.
Let's work on that one, OK?
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