The reality of war, or the reality TV of war!!

This poor Lebanese woman below has come home (3 times and in 3 different locations) to find that her home has been bombed. Perhaps she's just an extremely wealthy woman who had 3 homes. A more likely scenario is that she is keen to pick up a few dollars from the cameraman in return for a bit of staged wailing. The Reuters Photo fraud site has some classic examples of photo misrepresentation. How 'real' are the war images we are viewing?

Photo 1 caption - A Lebanese woman wails after looking at the wreckage of her apartment, in a building that was demolished by the Israeli attacks in southern Beirut July 22, 2006

Photo 2 caption - A Lebanese woman reacts at the destruction after she came to inspect her house in the suburbs of Beirut, Lebanon, Saturday, Aug. 5, 2006

Photo 3 - Again the Wailing Woman comes home only to find her third Beirut apartment destroyed.

Another example of photo 'doctoring' is the following front page picture on U.S News.

Photo 1 caption - A Hezbollah gunman with his AK 47 at a fire caused by an explosion in Kfarshima, near Beirut, Lebanon, Monday, July 17, 2006. The story claims the fire is the result of an Israeli military aircraft crashing to he ground. The reality of the fire is nothing more than tyres burning in a garbage dump. The gunman holding his weapon was merely for dramatic effect.

The photographer who took this image was sleep-deprived and hungry, feeling the strain of weeks in a war zone. He'd already filed dozens of strong photographs, but under pressure to produce something that would stand out from the competition, he made a fateful choice: He digitally altered one of his pictures to make it more compelling.

Experts say the trend is fueled by a range of factors. Growing pressure in newsrooms to compete with a growing array of media outlets may tempt photographers to push ethical boundaries and editors to sacrifice scrutiny for speed. New and widely available Photoshop technology has also created something of a slippery slope. Nearly all news photographs undergo some form of digital alteration these days.

The Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media December 2005 has a story on war content analysis of ABC NBC CBS CNN. Embedded journalists were more favourable in overall tone and employed more episodic framing. Episodic framing depicts concrete events that illustrate issues, while thematic framing presents collective or general evidence with some general context. For a full and complete picture we really need some general context, especially when comprehending the complexities of war. The war in Iraq has an unprecedented number of embedded journalists. Approximately 600 reporters are embedded on the front line. The journalist is 'attached' to the Department of Defence and therefore becomes biased. This study found that journalists developed a feeling of camaraderie, developing close personal relationships with the military personnel and become fully integrated into military command structures. The report found that embedded journalists were more favourable towards the governments position on the war and twice as likely to represent the Iraqi people as welcoming the invasion than as suspicious or hostile of the war.

Original Photos

'Doctored' photo

There are four methods of photographic misrepresentation.

1. Digitally manipulating images after the photographs have been taken.

2. Photographing staged scenes and presenting the images as if they were of authentic spontaneous news events.

3. Photographers themselves staging scenes or moving objects, and presenting photos of the set-ups as if they were naturally occurring.

4. Giving false or misleading captions to otherwise real photos that were taken at a different time or place.

Unmanned cameras are responsible for a lot of misrepresentation as they provide images without context. What is happening outside the frame? Nobody will every know!

What we see today is a 'slice of the war'. This particularlised perspective is only a small piece and does not represent the complexities of what the war is really about. Perhaps today we are merely capable of absorbing slices not complete stories involving context. We are conditioned to accept a reality TV version of life and this is reflected in all aspects of our experiences... war included.