Busted!

The Times new public editor, Byron Calame, takes his paper to task for using staged photographs, and not crediting them as such. Anything to make this country look bad goes, as far as the Times is concerned, overrrules journalistic standards. I'll quote at length, in case we lose the link at the bottom:

I believe Times readers deserve more precise and consistent explanations of the images put before them. Making the wording and explanations uniform across all sections of the paper would help ensure that readers know whether they are looking at news or at art...

Few sections deal with this issue more than The New York Times Magazine, which regularly goes beyond using standard news pictures and portraits by using montages, digital manipulation and staged photographs to grab readers' attention or capture a mood that helps buttress an article. It was an article there that brought the labeling issue into focus for me....

The "Interrogating Ourselves" cover article by the former executive editor Joseph Lelyveld in the June 12 magazine discussed the "lies, threats and highly coercive force" being used to pry information out of detainees held in military custody. What caught my attention was the full-page photograph across from the title page of the article.

It was a color photograph with a mid-torso view from the rear of a person with wrists handcuffed. Below the plastic handcuffs, a red stain ran down from one wrist across the soiled palm onto the fingers. The credit at the bottom of the facing page: "Photographs by Andres Serrano."

But there wasn't any explanation that the photograph had been staged. There was no caption. Four pages later, the same was true for the full-page staged photograph of water torture. The cover picture of a person with a sandbag hood also was identified only as a photograph by Mr. Serrano.

For those who scrutinized the photographs, there was one possible clue that they were posed. The coloring of the backdrop in each photograph was similar. And a note in small type at the bottom of the contents page identified the artist who painted the backdrop for Mr. Serrano's cover photograph.

Torture is "a provocative topic," Kathleen Ryan, the magazine's photography editor, said of her decision to hire Mr. Serrano, and "this is a provocative photographer." Mr. Serrano's artistic works include a controversial 1989 photograph of a crucifix submerged in urine and blood.

So there we have it, again - the media changing reality to fit their storyline of the Iraq war. While using one of the most offensive left-wing artist of the last generation to do it, natch...simply vomitous.


Link here: http://www.nytimes.com/2005/07/03/opinion/03publiceditor.html