"The media" over here in the US of A has worked itself into a good old-fashioned lather over the discovery that Fox News, a major media outlet for some folks, has been "doctoring" the news, that mythical creature of yore which supposedly thrives on objectivity. The brouhaha has arisen over Fox News' insertion of a crowd scene from video news footage shot at an unrelated event into video news footage of a more recent event. This enhancement of the news is, critics charge, nothing new at Fox News, and several websites purport to keep track of the more egregious instances of Fox's malfeasance in thus "reporting" the news.
Our objective in today's post is not to take sides in this debate, but merely to point out--as folks who collect books about the news industry are well aware--'tis nothing new:
As we suggested in our post on collecting books about propaganda (11 September 2009), most folks can be manipulated incredibly easily, especially those who persist in giving credence to that old saw, seeing is believing. The days when that adage could be trusted passed decades ago, as several books have made us all too keenly aware:
Debating Fox News' falsification of the historical record can easily plunge one into a long and tortuous examination of what is meant by freedom of the press, and of its frequent traveling companion, censorship.
As we plan to do a future series of posts on these interrelated topics, we are content for now to point out that the demand for books about this topic (the falsification of photographs and, by extension, of history) does not come only from folks building a private library about the news industry (in this context, focusing upon yellow journalism), but also from folks building private libraries about photography (in this context, what some concerned critics now term the post-photographic age; cf. our posts of 1-9 November 2009), history (in this context, falsified history; cf. our posts of 12-14 July 2009) and related subjects.
Optimists are prone to assert that in the Age of the Internet falsification of history is much more difficult than in ages past, since there are "eyes everywhere" ready to correct the historical record (à la Iran's recent election as reported by "the folks in the streets" via Twitter). Of course, this happy view may be undermined should all that digital data all go bye-bye....
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