Puppets and liars and the myth of the non-existent camera

There have already been a couple of Samizdata quotes of the day, the first officially labelled thus, and the second an SQOTD in all but title. Had there been no such copying and pasting postings so far today, then I would have put up a quote from this (“MSM sacrifices itself for Hezbollah”), such as, for instance, this:

The MSM usually claims that it is better than the blogosphere because it can filter and detect fraud. The Lebanon conflict shows that claim to be a flat out lie. The MSM may possibly speak truth to power but it seems keen to speak falsehood to the rest of us and to support the terrorists. I assume MSM support of the terrorists is based on the idea that idividual journalists may die or lose access to “scoops” unless they uncritically regurgitate terrorist propaganda, whereas they see no downside to criticising Israel or the USA becuase these countries have a tradition of press freedom. Unfortunately that analysis seems to be at the usual level of MSM strategic thought – poor. In the short term they are correct. In the long term they are as wrong as it is possible to be. Aside from state supported outlets such as the BBC the MSM depends on advertising revenue to survive and that revenue is roughly proportional to the audience size. If the MSM are shown to be puppets and liars then they will lose audience (which they are) and hence lose money. Eventually they will be out of a job. And even the BBC will feel the chill wind of financial cuts if it loses credibility – there is no reason to assume that the next UK government will not force the BBC to wean itself from the license fee and even less reason to assume that once weaned it will not see a drastic downsizing.

Meryl Yourish thinks this means that the terrorists are winning the propaganda war, to me it seems more likely that they are helping the MSM destroy itself. It really seems to me that Lebanon is going to be the place where the MSM collectively martyred itself, fighting for the cause of an Iranian backed terror group that seeks the utter destruction of Israel and the imposition of Sharia law and press censorship that would be antithetical to the MSM itself.

My thanks to Nigel Sedgwick (who urls himself as something to do with this) who flagged up this piece in a comment on this posting here yesterday. For me, one of the the biggest bullshit pretence who-the-fuck-do-they-think-they’re-kidding come-off-it-sunshine lie that the blogosphere and related social media are finally nailing now is the Myth of the Non-Existent Camera. Time and time again, on the telly (and it is just as ridiculous with documentaries about lone travellers intrepidly trudging through deserts and forests, accompanied by nobody and nothing . . . other than several vanloads of camera people and helicopter drivers and helicopter chartering experts, as it is with news gatherers and news creators), you see what looks like a certain particular thing. But it is actually, if you give this certain particular thing a further moment’s thought, something quite different, namely that one thing, plus all the palaver involved in that one thing being filmed or being photographed.

The MSM collude with one another to deny this, by deftly editing out any sight of the cameramen. It’s part of their professional ethos. Yet the presence of cameras profoundly impinges upon the events themselves, often completely altering the behaviour of those being photoed, and giving local power-seekers something to perform in front of, often in a deeply misleading or outright mendacious way. All this is now coming out, thanks to the blogosphere, and no thanks to the MSM to whom it is all a terrible embarrassment. Us, the story? Perish the thought. We don’t do navel gazing. Reality is reality, and we just photo it, is their line. We just, you know, heard about it and happened to be there. Sometimes, no doubt, this is exactly how it is. But anyone who has watched these processes close-up, or better, been part of such processes, knows that when they photograph it they are at least liable to change it, and that often it goes far beyond a mere bit of alteration, the reality being that the ‘reality’ they are photo-ing is a lie, told either by some local, or by the MSM themselves.

I had my first close-up look at this kind of thing when I was an architecture undergraduate at Cambridge University in the early seventies. I and a gang of lefty acquaintances (one of them was an fellow architect) were sitting around doing nothing in a lefty mate’s room. Suddenly, a dwarfish individual who identified himself as a cameraman working for The Daily Telegraph popped his head round the door and told the assembled throng that the notorious Enoch Powell was visiting Cambridge that afternoon, and that he had been sent to Cambridge to photograph the resulting riot. So, please would they oblige with a riot.

He got his photos. In a sense these photos were accurate. He didn’t doctor them or anything. But they were also a complete lie. The lefty rioters did not organise the riot, the way the photos said. The photographer organised the riot. He was the ringleader. But try writing a letter to the editor of the Telegraph about a thing like that. Forget it. If there had been blogs then, I would have been a blogger then and I would have been all over this. And if I had had a digital camera then, I would have photographed the photographer, and nailed him for the liar that he was. Or so I like to think. Now, this is what is actually happening.

Evelyn Waugh’s Scoop, which is the great comic novel about the lying, manipulative intrusiveness of the foreign correspondent industry, is now being written and published in real time.