| Conspiracy theory is successful business these days. Sometimes it seems even bigger than journalism. Just look at the Israel-Lebanon war. So-called citizen journalists armed with, um, laptop computers and Internet connections in North American suburbs set the whole world straight on what was really happening on the ground in Lebanon and Israel – and all from Ikea computer desks.
The reasoning behind this armchair "reporting" goes something like this: the mainstream media has a liberal, anti-Israel bias. Foreign correspondents share this bias. So do desk editors, copy editors, newspaper carriers and even their pet cats. Everyone connected to the mainstream media thinks the same: they want to make Israel look bad. They, in short, hate freedom.
Citizen journalists, the self-appointed new defenders of truth, are here to set us straight. They informed us on their blogs that news reports on the war from reputable news organizations like the Associated Press and the BBC are, in fact, hoaxes. "Hezbollah propaganda" is the common descriptor used by many of these bloggers.
There are many examples of this citizen journalism. One of the more painful ones is "The Red Cross Accident." Posted on an extremely partisan website called zombietime, and written anonymously (now there’s real courage for you!), the armchair report has this silly subhead: "How the media legitimized an anti-Israel hoax and changed the course of a war."
Mainstream news organizations – the ones that hate freedom – reported that on July 23, two Lebanese Red Cross ambulances were hit by Israeli missiles. Sounds serious, doesn’t it? But here’s the thing: "It never happened," according to zombietime. The Red Cross accident was a hoax, the site explains, designed to turn popular sentiment against Israel. The anonymous writer goes to excruciating lengths to prove his or her point, employing the citizen journalist’s new favourite tool: photo analysis.
True, photo analysis exposed one wayward Reuters photographer who added smoke to an image of burning buildings in Beirut. The photographer was fired, and rightly so. But since then, bloggers with way too much time on their hands have started seeing doctored and staged photos everywhere.
Here’s an example of photo analysis from zombietime. Most mainstream news organizations reported that the missiles hit the Red Cross ambulances and exploded, wounding the people inside. TIME Magazine, however, reported that one of the missiles "punched through the roof of the vehicle and exploded inside." This is a seemingly insignificant point, but our anonymous citizen journalist thinks it’s important.
He or she finds a few photos, and to advance his or her argument that the attack was staged, points out that in one of the photos, the windshield of one of the ambulances is caved inward. Notes our expert: "When there is an explosion inside a vehicle, things get blown outward." Gasp! It must all be a hoax, then. If a news report or photo should challenge the ideology of partisan citizen journalists, it’s automatically labelled as fake, staged or simply not credible.
Meanwhile, reporters who employ outdated journalistic methods like going to the places they’re writing about are getting smeared for their work by these same bloggers. (There’s a sweet irony in the fact that these citizen journalists would have absolutely no material to work with if it wasn’t for real journalists.) They accuse reporters of being shills for Hezbollah. One local windbag went as far as calling mainstream news reports "anti-Semitic forgery."
Reporters on the ground are understandably getting fed up with this unfair scrutiny. Christopher Allbritton – who has reported for the Associated Press, the New York Daily News and TIME – recently decided to take a break from his blog because of it. Here’s what he had to say on his blog about conspiracy theorists who try to drown out fair, accurate journalism with loud but deceptive commentary:
"It seems the blogosphere has become more concerned with "gotcha" politics and "fact checking your ass" mantras by armchair photo analysts who have no clue about what happens in a war or how photographs are made and distributed. They just want to score points in what seems to be, at best, a debating club rather than real life and death situations."
Allbritton continues: "I got tired of defending myself to ankle-biters who frankly had no idea what they were talking about. I got tired of going out every day, risking the life of my driver, translator and myself, only to be told I can’t do anything put parrot Hezbollah propaganda. It was insulting and it pissed me off. To all you people who think you could do better in a war zone, bring it on."
That’s a fair challenge, and one that I’m betting none of these so-called citizen journalists will embrace.
Jeremy Klaszus is the contributing editor of Alberta Views magazine. |
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