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September 29, 2005
How to Lie With Photography
The key is not what the photograph says, but what you make sure it does not say. Zombie demonstrates how it's done by the pros at the San Francisco Chronicle.
Say you're a photojournalist of the useful idiot variety and you come across a communist stage-managing some ghetto riffraff to pose with obscene placards and Palestinian flags in order to express their hostility toward Western Civilization. The communist is way too far out there to understand or even care that the scene she has composed will frighten and/or disgust normal people; if she weren't, she wouldn't be walking around in a shirt representing the flag of the totalitarian regime that brought hell to Earth in Vietnam.
The useful idiot photojournalist's task is to convert this scene into something that can be sold to people who shower on a regular basis. Bridging the gap between pompous, phony liberal elitists and the barely human barbarians they champion in opposition to their own society is a crucial task of mainstream media propagandists. Failure to perform this task effectively could result in moonbattery being laughed out of existence.
Here's a shot that takes in the whole scene (please excuse the obscenities; not to worry, they will be edited out):
Even most Democrats would cross the street — if not move to suburbia — to avoid this kind of sociopathic lowlife. But notice the girl in center — if you just zoom in on her, and cut out everything else, the bandana over her face loses its context, so that it seems almost more cute than sinister, just as a little kid dressed up as a pirate for Halloween would evoke none of the dread of a real-life cutthroat buccaneer.
So here's how the Chronicle presented the scene to its readers:
Nice work, huh? Images often go right to our subconscious, bypassing the usual critical filters as if they were raw experience. One properly cropped picture is worth a thousand words of frenzied editorial page bloviations. You have to hand it to the mainstream media: they may not know what they're doing, but they know how to do it.
Thanks to Debris Trail at Celestial Junk Blog for the tip.
Posted by Van Helsing at September 29, 2005 1:06 PM
Comments
Oh, I'm pretty confident that the libs in the MSM are quite aware of what they're doing. And yeah, they're damn good at it. Far too many folks don't see through it as you do.
>>"...convert this scene into something that can be sold
>> to people who shower on a regular basis."
Great way to describe the protesters - in reverse. Very clever!!
Posted by: reverse_vampyr at September 29, 2005 3:09 PM
What liberal bias?
Posted by: Josh at September 29, 2005 3:29 PM
It makes you wonder, are the kids in the photo really that political, or did "super commie" shell out a few bucks for each of them.
I wonder if the thought of most people when they saw the closeup of that kid in the Chronicle was , "awe, isnt she a cute little kid. something is really wrong with this country if these cute little kids are out protesting."
Something IS wrong. And we have to fix it. Bringing Dan Rather's propaganda to light for the whole world to see was a giant first step.
Posted by: Nedreck Milhunky at September 29, 2005 7:23 PM
The lies and distortions on the left side of the political spectrum abound. I just got done ripping apart an article about FEMA's Brown that used year-old quotes to support its false assertations.
Its still easy, but its getting boring.
STOP WASTING MY TIME YOU GODDAM POLITICAL HACKS!
/whoa, where'd that come from?
Posted by: Josh at September 29, 2005 7:45 PM
Hmmm....
"People of color say no to war!"
So...
Michael Moore, Cindy Sheehan,George Galloway, Jane Fonda, and the herrenvolk at Stormfront are...Black?
Posted by: phil at September 30, 2005 6:43 AM
And get a load of that ring on her finger. Can't you tell she's oppressed?
Posted by: Von Oyster at September 30, 2005 7:50 AM
Why would you edit out the obscenities? We're all big boys and girls here, or so I hope, and I for one don't shrivel and wilt at hearing or reading a "bad word"...
Editing them only makes them seem slightly more reasonable and innocuous. Is that what you want?
Posted by: Cato the Elder at September 30, 2005 5:08 PM
Cato, what I meant was, the obscenities would be edited out by the Chronicle. In the picture they published, you don't see the placard with the obscenities all over it.
Posted by: Van Helsing at September 30, 2005 8:23 PM
Oh, sorry for the misunderstanding. Yes, of course the MSM wants these folks to seem reasonable... even heroic, for "speaking truth to power" (whatever the hell that means, I've never been able to figure it out).
Posted by: Cato the Elder at October 3, 2005 3:40 PM
