Michael Totten has an excellent post up on the way in which the media uses the "zoom" on their cameras to manipulate perceptions of events: The Nut Job Media Circus. "Jihad Rage Boy" makes an appearance.

As part of the discussion, the subject of Stephanie Gutmann's excellent book (a serious must-read), The Other War: Israelis, Palestinians and the Struggle for Media Supremacy, comes up. Stephanie responded in the comments there, but thinks those comments deserve more attention. I think you'll agree, so what follows below in normal type is what we'll call a guest post from Stephanie. First she responds to the question of whether the cover of the book itself is a Photoshop, then she tells a very interesting anecdote. Here is a scan of my copy of her book for illustrative purposes (click for larger).

I got the shot from an editor at BaMahane (an inhouse magazine of the IDF). Not the kind of publication interested in playing up the "boys with stones versus monsters in tanks" angle and probably more interested in making an ironic comment about the hordes of journalists the poor IDF guys had to work around everyday during the second intifada. The shot was taken by an on-duty IDF soldier (it was his job, or one of them, to record stuff) who had no financial motivation to "sex up" his shot so he could sell it. The guy was on salary. Not a freelancer paid per shot. In fact, he didn't, poor guy, get anything for our right to use the shot on my cover 'cause the photo was owned by the IDF. (As SOME consolation, however, he, Oded Balility, did win a 2007 Pulitzer for best breaking news photograph.)

I know the shot looks funny on my cover -- there's a kind of ghost thing happening around Stone Thrower Kid which can suggest a cut and paste. I think that has something to do with the reproduction. The shot did not look at all suspicious in the original digital file. (You can also see the photo in a 2001 Weekly Standard, illustrating an article, by me, titled "Lights, Camera, Intifada.")

Why are some photogs focusing in an other direction? I assume they didn't have a great angle on Stone Thrower Kid (like maybe all they were getting was his back), so they were using their telephotos to go for something in the background -- other guys with stones, a tank, or anything else that looked cool and combat zone-ish.

Besides the lack of financial motivation what would be the news-value motivation of going to the trouble of photoshopping a shot of a Palestinian rock thrower getting the Cannes star treatment? As a number of people have pointed out, journalists move around in a herd, and they tend to pounce what they perceive as a good shot like cats who've missed a meal. In any given day during the second intifada you could have taken a shot of herding journalists many times 'cause journalists often outnumbered real participants.

As far as Columbia Journalism school. Hey, I was trying to INTEGRATE CJS. They need more "other voices" and, I tried, whenever possible to contribute one.

Geeez, there are so many distortions -- small and large. A small but important one is the fact that so often in films or tv shows you can hear Arabic speakers say the word "Yahud" for "Jew" and in the subtitles it is translated as "Israeli."

You can see this in the very subtly propagandistic HBO film "Death in Gaza." I don't know if the filmmaker herself was in on this or if she was just a victim of her translator, but obviously it makes a subtle difference. If the Hamas kiddies or whoever are talking about "Israelis" its a political issue, right? Kinda dignified like -- all about borders and UN resolutions and stuff. But if it's Jews they're talking trash about...well, that would be the big liberal bugaboo RACIST, and we can't hear our pure oppressed victim culture heroes talking like that....

Speaking of "Death in Gaza" and the issue of "framing" shots, here is a very minor incident of it involving the "Death in Gaza" cameraman James Miller (who was later killed by IDF fire thus becoming the "death in Gaza", the film ends up being about.):

One day in 2002 my fixer and I were parked in a line of cars waiting to proceed on the road to the town of Nablus. It had been a long wait (I think that was the day the IDF checkpoint guards had found a bomb in a Jerusalem-bound produce truck and had taken it away to do a controlled explosion. There are generally not enough people to handle bomb disposal and normal traffic processing, so traffic tends to come to a stop.)

Anyhow, to pass the time I wandered up to the front of the line and was not terribly surprised to see that the MSM had already descended on this juicy bit of action and were already scurrying around doing their mikes and notebooks thing. I was a bit surprised to see, however, that, standing near a couple of Arab women in traditional costume and an Red Crescent Medi Van, was none other than a veritable celebrity journalist (she's so famous her name escapes me at this moment), a face I knew from TV, the gal who did that documentary about women in Afghanistan.

I made a beeline for her and said something to the effect of "Hey, it's you! How the heck are ya and what brings you to this neck of the woods?! (In my floppy green sun hat, flowered yellow skirt, purple tee, slung with point and shoot camera, I do not think she recognized me for the ahem serious, Columbia-trained journalist that I in fact was....) In a distracted way she explained that she had various grants to do documentaries about human rights and she'd last been in Afghanistan. Her next stop had been "here", she said with an expansive gesture to do "this." I was chewing on the fact she thought it was a natural progression from the condition of Taliban-era women in Afghanistan to "this" (a gesture that seemed to take in Israel as well as the territories), when I heard a irritated shot of "hey!" or "you!" or something emphatic and looked up to see James Miller gesturing at me frantically to move. I stepped a few feet away from the Red Crescent van and the traditionally dressed Arab women. That apparently wasn't far enough, so, in this imperious way he had, he impatiently waved at me again. He wanted me out of the shot. I guess the gist is, if he was going to photograph a stalled checkpoint or a narrative about Arab Women Wilting In The Hot Sun whilst Arrogant IDF Soldiers Took Their Time about letting them pass, he wasn't going to sully the shot with a loudly dressed American tourist who was wilting in the sun at the same time.

This is a very small and some would say benign example of framing but I still found it irritating (and not just because Miller didn't bother to say "Would you mind moving?" or "could you please move".) I thought documentaries are supposed to DOCUMENT, to be about warts-and-all reality and the unpicteresque reality is that there are often Americans or other types of Westerners in these lines and there are usually reporters crawling over everything as well. That is, in turn, a reflection of a really important reality: namely that Palestinians are in no way abandoned or left to fend for themselves. The place is crawling with aid workers, Frenchmen and Swedes acting as "observers", UN types with clipboards, pudgy, sandal-wearing Middlewestern Presbyterians from the Christian Peacemaker Teams, International Solidarity Movement wackos, freelance photo journalists out to get their Pulitzer shot, romantic Arabist ladies who want to write poetry about the beautiful, anguished men of Al Aqsa Marytrs Brigade and so on and so forth.....The area, as most aid workers will tell you (particularly those really pissed-off guys who work in Africa) gets far more attention and money than it needs or even deserves.