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| 5/25 |
| 2006/1/24-25 [Politics/Domestic/Abortion] UID:41497 Activity:moderate |
1/24 Pictures from SF "Walk for Life" (pro-life march)
http://www.zombietime.com/walk_for_life
\_ Check out its Anatomy of a Photograph page about how the media is
biased: http://csua.org/u/er6
\_ Replace your well-composed photograph with my crappy one now!
\_ "The page is not meant to be an argument for one side or the other,
nor does it analyze the merits of either position. It is simply
an essay about what happened that day, and what people did."
Ridiculous. It's a photo-essay presented to support the photo-
grapher's viewpoint. That's fine, but pretending to be unbiased
is not.
\_ Any media which doesn't support my viewpoint is biased!
\_ I think that statement is pretty much correct. The photo
essay does not make any points pro or anti-abortion. It
just comments on the behavior of the two factions. The
commentary on that may be biased, s/he does seem to think
that many of the pro-choice crowd are jerks, but s/he never
makes any arguments about the issue of abortion.
\_ Sorry, I thought the people at the rally were the issues
being discussed. And on that, s/he's biased.
\_ Isn't that what the web site said? "It is simply an
essay about what happened that day, and what people
did".
\_ And the photos and comments he featured portray certain
groups of people as competent and others as liars.
It's fish in a barrel to take unwholesome pictures of
Pro-Choicers disrupting a rally like this.
\_ This is the same guy who claims that the entire city of San
Francisco is pro-terrorist because he saw some grafitti on the
sidewalk that he didn't like. The guy is a moron.
\_ So is every journalist I've ever met. So what?
\_ http://www.zombietime.com/eyes_wide_open
"Turns out I was right -- San Franciscans don't think
Americans are the equivalent of the terrorists. They think
Americans are worse than the terrorists."
Go ahead and read that kind of hateful trash if you want,
but I have better things to do with my time.
\_ I think instead of giving us "a variety of fresh perspectives",
the huge array of "reporting" we now have just lets everyone these
days live in an echo chamber where their beliefs are never
challenged by inconvenient facts. (emphasis on "inconvenient",
not "facts")
\_ You mean like motd?
\_ The motd is not an echo chamber. People agree, people
disagree. People post things that other people violently
disagree with.
\_ People are also apparently violent masturbators. See
below. |
| 5/25 |
|
| www.zombietime.com/walk_for_life -> www.zombietime.com/walk_for_life/ The "Walk for Life" March and Counter-Demonstration This is a photographic record of the "Walk for Life West Coast" march and counter-protest that happened in San Francisco on Saturday, January 21, 2006. Because this is a very sensitive issue to many people, I will keep the editorializing to a minimum and for the most part let the photos speak for themselves. I will also refer to each side in the debate by its own chosen appellation: those who favor abortion will be called "pro-choice" and those who don't favor abortion will be called "pro-life." The page is not meant to be an argument for one side or the other, nor does it analyze the merits of either position. It is simply an essay about what happened that day, and what people did. pro-choice crowd actively encouraged wildcat actions to disrupt the planned event at any cost (as the calendar listing said, "Autonomous direct actions to shut down the march are also encouraged"). Throughout the morning, a colorful array of pro-choice activists -- sporting homemade signs like this one, for the most part -- gathered on the Embarcadero, along the San Francsico waterfront. The pro-life contingent assembled across the street in Justin Herman Plaza, and were repeatedly admonished: Do not respond to any provocations. Most of the pro-lifers were members of Christian organizations from all over the state. Very few carried individualized messages, which had been discouraged by the organizers. If there was any overall theme to the pro-choice rhetoric, it was that the pro-life crowd was part of a right-wing fascist agenda to drag America back to the theocratic Dark Ages. When one young anarachist expressed infuriated incomprehension that the Christians could be allowed to display their messages, a friendly but stern policeman patiently explained to him the definition of "free speech." The anarchist retorted, "But who the hell do they think they are, saying that shit here?" The column was stopped periodically to clear counter-protesters out of the road. As the link at the top of this report shows, the pro-choice crowd had planned not to simply make their voices heard, but to stop the march entirely: "We are calling on the people and workers of San Francisco and the Bay Area to rise up and completely stop them in their tracks and shut down their march." In fact, three separate attempts were made to derail the march. The woman on the right is part of a group trying to stretch a pro-abortion banner across the road. Her smile indicates she has no idea what's about to happen. But the banner was too valuable to risk it acquiring a motorcycle-shaped hole. A few "voice of authority" commands from the leading cop was all it took for the WCW people to pack it in and proffer the not-too-believable excuse that they were "just crossing the street." The march continued northward toward a culture clash in Fisherman's Wharf. |
| csua.org/u/er6 -> www.zombietime.com/sf_rally_september_24_2005/anatomy_of_a_photograph/ By chance, I took a photo of the same girl just a few moments later. 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. Let's take a step backward and reveal what the San Francisco Chronicle didn't want you to see. 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. Now we can see that the girl is just one of several teenagers, all wearing terrorist-style bandannas covering their faces. 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? the flag of Communist Vietnam, which has been frequently displayed by such groups at protest rallies in the US for decades. 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 whole truth. 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 conform to the narrative that the Chronicle 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. 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. They insist that I allow my readers to see the Chronicle's side of the story, but they won't let their readers see my side of the story. Please note that I do not claim that the Chronicle cropped its photograph, which is obviously a high-resolution close-up and thus not cropped much, if at all; I also didn't say that the Chronicle ran the photo on the front page of its print edition, but rather on the front page of its online edition. Part of the Chronicle's attempted rebuttal is the claim that, since some of my readers jumped to the conclusion that the picture was on the front page of the print edition, this somehow constituted an "error" on my part that I refuse to acknowledge. I think that it should be fairly universally understood that when a Web site provides a link to an article or photo it is discussing, it is referring to the online version. Blogs and media-related Web sites deal pretty much exclusively with information and links that are online. The Chronicle also defends itself by saying that its article about the rally did mention a few of the controversial aspects of the event. A defense which, to me, misses the mark on two counts: first, "Anatomy of a Photograph" was specifically about the Chronicle's photo coverage (and the decision to highlight one specific photograph), not about the textual news article; and second, its article only very peripherally referred to a couple of radical elements, and glossed over almost all of the extremism that was manifested at the rally. And lastly, the Chronicle claims that the photo was chosen because it was visually arresting, not for any political considerations. And of course the photo is a good image, based solely on stylistic characteristics: the girl is pretty, and her face is in sharp focus. But this brings up a larger issue concerning media coverage of these events. Newspapers and other mainstream outlets run photos that almost always fall into these four categories: a Wide shots of the crowd at a distance, in which individual messages aren't clearly visible. Now, there's nothing wrong with any of these kinds of photographs; But what media outlets rarely publish are the kind of photographs that I feature on zombietime: mid-range images focusing on individual protesters displaying their heartfelt (and often intense) messages. And that's all a rally is really composed of: thousands of individuals, each with their own messages. By showing them as an overall group, or by showing the individuals without their messages, or by showing only non-controversial messages, media outlets (probably unconsciously) influence the public's impressions of such events as being somewhat less disturbing and less politically radical than they really are. Yet the public is hungry for the type of uncompromising, in-your-face photography that can be found on zombietime and similar Web sites and blogs, since we show the kind of images that simply can't be found in mainstream media outlets. Whitewashing potential controversies, or lazily presenting unchallenged the narrative of people or groups it is covering, only leads to a bland paper and a bored readership. |
| www.zombietime.com/eyes_wide_open -> www.zombietime.com/eyes_wide_open/ Sponsored by the American Friends Service Committee (AFSC, better known as the Quakers), the exhibit consists of thousands of pairs of shoes, lined up in rows, representing all the servicemen and -women killed in Iraq. According to the media, much of the controversy surrounding the exhibit focuses on the fact that none of the families of the dead soldiers gave their permission for their loved ones' names and photos to be included in the display. But what the families actually didn't like was the exhibit's not-so-hidden agenda. Critics point out that Eyes Wide Open purports to honor the fallen servicemen in Iraq, while it actually uses the fac,ade of supporting the troops to promote a hardline anti-war stance. Sure enough, in the tent that accompanied the exhibit, a series of large panels laid out the case against the war, using the usual litany of "facts" that the anti-everything crowd has repeated so often as to actually believe they're true. Also in the tent was this quilt supposedly made by a little Iraqi girl. Am I the only one who thinks it looks suspiciously like something designed and made by an American public relations firm? Call me a skeptic, I don't care -- that crying fish is just a little too "perfect" as far as I'm concerned, not to mention the name "Fatima" in Roman letters instead of Arabic. the Board of Supervisors voted to lower the flag at City Hall (seen here in the background) to half-staff in honor of all the casualties of the Iraq War, regardless of nationality (undoubtedly in conjunction with the arrival of the exhibit, though the article doesn't mention that detail), but the mayor refused to do it, citing some arcane regulations as his excuse. But the entire exhibit bothered me for a completely different reason. Alongside the shoes representing the American troops were additional rows of "civilian shoes" representing "Iraqi casualties." And what bothered me was the misleading way "civilian" and "Iraqi" were equated without any further elaboration. Alongside the "civilian" shoes (which, by the way, are not actually shoes from Iraq, but rather shoes donated by American volunteers to symbolize the Iraqis' shoes), there was a memorial wall, seemingly modeled after the Vietnam War Memorial in Washington DC, but in this case inscribed with the names of Iraqis instead of Americans. As I looked at the placards honoring the Iraqis, it occurred to me that the vast majority were adult men. While there undoubtedly have been innocent victims of the war (and yes, each of those deaths is a tragedy), not every single Iraqi who died was a "civilian," as the AFSC would want us to believe. I'm not sure if reliable statistics have ever been released, but from the careful manner in which the United States has conducted the campaign it seems fairly obvious that a substantial portion -- I'd estimate 75% at least -- of the casualties were (in order, from the start of the war) soldiers in Saddam Hussein's army, Republican Guard troops, Ba'athist "insurgents," Sunni militia members, foreign jihadis, and all manner of thugs, fanatics and killers. The American military has gone to extremes to minimize civilian casualties, and the vast majority of the time if someone was killed by US forces, that person was killed while actively engaged in the battle to kill Americans. Seeking clarification, I went over to the literature table. There, I discovered that the Eyes Wide Open logo depicted not an American soldier, as one might expect, but rather a Muslim girl. Which, I suppose, indicates what the real focus of the exhibit is. The exhibit schedule revealed that on the following day a muezzin would perform a Muslim call to prayer over the shoes -- with its repeated cries of "Allah Ackbar." Even more chillingly, the AFSC's "Iraq Quick Facts" sheet handed out to all visitors listed Saddam Hussein as the current president of Iraq. Were the organizers of Eyes Wide Shut merely against the war in principle -- or were they taking sides? As I scanned the pages, lost in my thoughts, I found an unexpected ally. A guy dressed in grungy clothes, looking a bit like a down-and-out former gang member or drug addict, was crossing the plaza and surveying the exhibit with an air of disdain. Somehow sensing that I wasn't the typical Eyes Wide Open fan, he said to me as he passed, "Which ones are the Al Qaeda shoes? The rest of these people viewing the Eyes Wide Open exhibit are merely naive, I reasoned. They don't actually think there is a moral equivalence between the terrorists and those who fight terrorism. |