- Jeff -This is a great example of press censorship - and
how communist control is influencing protests.
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- Why? Because the San Francisco Chronicle, which had the
only mainstream media coverage of the rally, published this photograph
on the front page of its Web site as a teaser for their article about the
event.
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- Now, let's take a closer look at this image.
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- By chance, I took a photo of the same girl just a few
moments later. Looks practically identical, doesn't it?
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- But you might notice that my picture is lower resolution.
That's because it's a zoomed-in portion of a much larger photograph. I
cropped off the other parts of the picture to get a close-up of the girl.
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- But what would happen if I hadn't cropped off so much?
Let's take a step backward and reveal what the San Francisco Chronicle
didn't want you to see.
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- Here's the same photo without as much cropping, revealing
more of the context. You can see that the girl's protest contingent also
sported Palestinian flags and obscene placards.
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- Now let's take another step back.
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- Here's my full original photo, uncropped. Now we can
see that the girl is just one of several teenagers, all wearing terrorist-style
bandannas covering their faces.
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- But, as you'll notice, the bandannas are all printed
with the same design. Was this a grassroots protest statement the teenagers
had come up with all by themselves?
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- To find out, let's take a look at another photo in the
series, taken at the same time:
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- Oops -- it looks like they're actually being stage-managed
by an adult, who is giving them directions and gu! iding them toward the
front of the march. But who is she?
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- The last picture in the series reveals all.
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- It turns out that the woman giving directions belongs
to one of the Communist groups organizing the rally -- if her t-shirt is
to be believed, since it depicts the flag of Communist Vietnam, which has
been frequently displayed by such groups at protest rallies in the U.S.
for decades.
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- The San Francisco Chronicle featured the original photograph
on its front page in order to convey a positive message about the rally
-- perhaps that even politically aware teenagers were inspired to show
up and rally for peace, sporting the message, "People of Color say
'No to War!'" And that served the Chronicle's agenda.
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- But this simple analysis reveals the very subtle but
insidious type of bias that occurs in the media all the time. The Chronicle
did not print an inaccuracy, nor did it doctor a photograph to misrepresent
the facts. Instead, the Chronicle committed the sin of omission: it told
you the truth, but it didn't tell you the wholetruth.
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- Because the whole truth -- that the girl was part of
a group of naive teenagers recruited by Communist activists to wear terrorist-style
bandannas and carry Palestinian flags and obscene placards -- is disturbing,
and doesn't conf! orm to the narrative that the Chro nicle is trying to
promote. By presenting the photo out of context, and only showing the one
image that suits its purpose, the Chronicle is intentionally manipulating
the reader's impression of the rally, and the rally's intent.
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- Such tactics -- in the no-man's-land between ethical
and unethical -- are commonplace in the media, and have been for decades.
It is only now, with the advent of citizen journalism, that we can at last
begin to see the whole story and realize that the public has been manipulated
like this all along.
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- http://www.zombietime.com/sf_rally_september_24_2005/anatomy_of_a_photograph/
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