Media Bias Rears its Head

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Dread,



Sorry, but I believe you have been hoaxed, again.





I believe the above site I referenced, a right-wing bull shit site where all four pictures you posted came from, may have been doctored.


below is the article from the Telegragh with the accompaning picture.




Massacre in the rush-hour
By Isambard Wilkinson in Madrid


wterr12.jpeg

(Filed: 12/03/2004)


A series of simultaneous bomb explosions tore through four packed Spanish commuter trains at the height of the morning rush-hour yesterday, leaving at least 190 people dead in one of Europe's worst terrorist atrocities.

The Spanish government immediately accused the Basque terrorist group Eta but last night a claim of responsibility was made in the name of al-Qa'eda.


Ten bombs hidden in rucksacks exploded on four trains

Shortly before, police found detonators and an Arabic-language tape with Koranic verses in a stolen van in the Madrid suburb where it was believed the bombs had been planted.

Al-Qa'eda has repeatedly threatened members of the US-led coalition in Iraq, including Spain which has 1,300 troops there.

Thirteen bombs were placed in trains heading into Atocha station, Madrid's busiest terminal. Ten of the 60lb devices, each hidden in a backpack, exploded. More than 1,200 people were reported wounded, several of them Britons.

The terrorists' methods, including carefully synchronised explosions and a determination to kill the maximum number of civilians, suggested Islamist involvement.

A London-based Arabic newspaper, al-Quds al-Arabi, said it had received a letter purporting to come from al-Qa'eda claiming responsibility for the attacks on the "crusaders" and warning that another strike against America was imminent.

Angel Acebes, the interior minister, said the discovery of the van opened "all kinds of lines of investigation". He added: "I have just given instructions to the security forces not to rule out any line of investigation."

The authorities said the death count would rise and almost certainly exceed the 202 killed in the Bali bombing of October 2002. That would make it the worst terrorist incident since September 11.

"This is mass murder," Jose Maria Aznar, the prime minister, told Spaniards in a televised address following an emergency cabinet meeting. "No negotiation is possible or desirable with these assassins, who so many times have sown death across Spain."

The scale and audacity of the attacks appeared to have been influenced by the September 11 attacks in America and subsequent Islamist attacks around the world.

But Spanish officials said the explosives were the same as those used by Eta in the past and noted that the attacks came three days before the general election, a period normally marked by Eta blasts.

Eta's political wing, the banned radical party Batasuna, said it "absolutely rejected" the attacks and was convinced Eta was not responsible. It blamed "Arab resisters".

Some Spanish commentators have suggested a link between Eta and Islamist extremists, but this has never been proved. As security forces defused the three bombs that did not go off, survivors spoke of terrible carnage.

The terrorist attacks devastated trains and stations. "It looked like a platform of death," said one witness who described a body on the station roof.

Ana Maria Mayor, another passenger, said: "I saw a baby torn to bits."

As scores of bloodied passengers staggered from stations and trains, the dead and dying were piled amid the wreckage. Cries of pain emanated from the smoke.

Another witness, Mariano, 28, said: "I had a girl in my arms and I lost her. She died in my arms."

Eta often warns of its planned attacks but this time there was no call. The bombs started exploding at 7:39am in a commuter train heading for the bustling Atocha station.

Blasts then hit trains and platforms at two suburban stations, El Pozo and Santa Eugenia. Both trains were heading to Atocha. Worst hit was a double-decker train at El Pozo, where two bombs killed 70 people.

Security officials said the attacks had been timed so that bombs went off as all four trains arrived at Atocha but the plan misfired because they were running two minutes late.

As campaigning for Sunday's election was halted, thousands of people gathered in towns across Spain, expressing outrage at the atrocity. Larger protests are planned tonight.

The Queen sent a message to King Carlos of Spain. It said: "These attacks of terrorism have struck without discrimination and have horrified the people of the United Kingdom."

Tony Blair said: "This terrible attack underlines the threat that we all continue to face from terrorism in many countries." President George W Bush called the bombings a "vicious act of terrorism".



An altered picture of W reading a book to school chidren, holding it upside down, is another example - both sides mislead.
 
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I do not know how you think this proves anything...LOL But OK...Someone posted that TIME printed the same picture, and it is not on their website either.

If I posted something innacurately, I admit it when I am wrong. Always have in here, and I always will.
 
I donot believe that online news outlets put the same pictures up. I searched the Times and the Guardian and there were no pictures to go with it.

I am still going with the fact that these are real photos. Although the running text along the bottom of the three newspaper photos is suspicious in that they all seem to have the same text along the bottom.
 
as i said

people seem to find what they are looking for.






still it remains that the four photos you posted came from that
right-wing nut site*



*my opinion
 
deep said:


still it remains that the four photos you posted came from that
right-wing nut site*

*my opinion

I have been searching for the Reuters photo elsewhere since you posted. Reuters seems to only hold them on their site for so many days. Any chance you would have a trick up your sleave to find it?

But I have found the Guardian Article about the photograph....

[Q]By Claire Cozens
The Guardian
March 12, 2004

A harrowing image of victims of the Madrid train bombing that appeared on several newspaper front pages was altered to remove a bloodied limb which some editors thought would offend readers, it emerged today.

The photograph, which appeared in virtually every newspaper today, showed victims strewn across the tracks beside the wreck of a train.

The Times, the Daily Telegraph, the Sun and the Daily Mail have removed what appears to be a blood-soaked piece of a limb, airbrushing it out and replacing it with stones matching those between the rails.

The Guardian also took the decision to change the image - it changed the colour of the bloodied body part from red to grey, making it almost impossible to distinguish.

Other newspapers, including the Independent and the Daily Mirror, got around the problem by printing the image in black and white.

Paul Johnson, the Guardian's deputy editor, news, said that while the colour change was "not perfect by any means", it was the best solution.

"The photograph encapsulated the scale of this very human tragedy. It's an extraordinary photograph that was just in the margins of what we could use on the front page, but in that left-hand corner was an identifiable body part. To my mind that put us over the threshold."

"We could have cropped it out, but someone came up with the suggestion that we bleed out the colour. It is not perfect by any means but I felt it was the best solution all round because it didn't eradicate anything from the picture."

The Telegraph's picture editor, Bob Bodman, defended the decision to alter the image, which appears on the Telegraph's front page today.

"It's a question of taste. At the end of the day our readers know there has been a horrific explosion. You clean up an image if you feel it does not change the context - in this case had that object been at the side we would have cropped it. It didn't really add anything to the picture," he said.

"Sometimes you need to see the horrors and there is a limit to how much you want to clean up a picture. But there was so much going on in this photograph, with people attending to each other, it was just a fantastic picture."

Mr Bodman admitted he had received calls, including one from the news agency AFP, asking why he had altered the image.

"We try not to do it, but at the end of the day we make decisions that are right for our readers, not for other journalists," he said, adding that an image of an Iraqi boy published in the Telegraph during the war had prompted dozens of complaints because body parts were visible in the background.

"We thought they were murky enough not to worry us, but we still got calls from readers," he said.

The picture was taken by a photographer for the Spanish newspaper El Pais, which used it unaltered on its front page today.

The newspaper also featured even more harrowing images, including showing the inside of a train with horrifically injured passengers whose faces were recognisable.

But Reuters, which sold the photograph, said British newspapers tended to take a more conservative approach to such images.

"Our view is that we don't like any removals of any kind. We do not tolerate it on behalf of our photographers. Our view is that anything that could have been done in a dark room is acceptable, but we can't tolerate anything that changes the editorial context - we couldn't afford to do otherwise," said David Viggers, senior pictures editor at Reuters.

"I wouldn't have removed it myself, although I can understand why some people have chosen to do so. It didn't alter the context of the image."

The Press Complaints Commission's code bans newspapers from publishing "inaccurate, misleading or distorted material including pictures".

Advances in technology have made it easier than ever before to doctor photographs imperceptibly, although there are question marks over how far news organisations should be allowed to go.

"Cleaning up" photographs - for example by removing the stray outline of a person from the edge of the frame - is relatively common, but more substantial alterations are frowned upon.

Last year the Los Angeles Times, which has a policy of not altering news photographs, sacked a photographer for having superimposed two images to make them more powerful.

The staff cameraman, Brian Walski, had amalgamated two photographs of a British soldier directing a crowd of cowering Iraqis in Basra taken moments apart to improve the dramatic composition.

In a recent interview with the Guardian, the celebrated artist David Hockney said modern photography is now so extensively and easily altered that it can no longer be seen to be true or factual.

"We can't go back: Kodak got rid of 22,000 people when it ended its chemical developing. You've no need to believe a photograph made after a certain date because it won't be made the way Cartier-Bresson made his," he said.

"We know he didn't crop them - he was the master of truthful photography. But you can't have a photographer like that again because we know photographs can be made in different ways."

MediaGuardian.co.uk ? Guardian Newspapers Limited 2004 [/Q]
 
Well, it is good that it was not completely fabricated.


I still stand by my first reply.


It is no big deal.



If a person picked up his morning paper and it had the altered picture.

I do not believe they would say, "This in pretty bad, dead bodies, maimed people, a couple of hundred dead."

"But, no bloody limb in the foreground, those terrorists are so bad afterall."


Again the premiss of this thread is silly.


A while back when someone altered a picture of a U. S soldier pointing a gun at the head of a civilian, That was

Media Bias Rears its Head

or Photographer bias.
 
If it is acceptable here....who is to draw the lines elsewhere?

ANd links to the pictures

http://media.guardian.co.uk/presspublishing/images/0,11312,1168288,00.htm
http://media.guardian.co.uk/presspublishing/images/0,11312,1168294,00.html
http://media.guardian.co.uk/presspublishing/images/0,11312,1168300,00.html
http://media.guardian.co.uk/presspublishing/images/0,11312,1168303,00.html

It is too bad the "right" has to go to such lengths on this board to stay afloat. I come here for intelligent discussion, not to have to defend what I post.

If i wanted to hang out and discuss this with right wing nut jobs on "bullshit" sites I would post there. I find most in here to be more intelligent.
 
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Dreadsox said:
How come when the United States is accused of atrocities, the press has NO PROBLEM publishing photographs?

When terrorists strike, the press edits, blurs, places rocks...ect...
Why? Is it to diminish the effects of the terrorism? Is it to prevent people from reacting harshly towards the terrorists?

Does this bother anyone else? Or is it no big deal:eyebrow:

The real photo:
http://216.93.175.73/images/uploads/atocha_reuters.jpg[/IMG]

The Guardian:

http://216.93.175.73/images/uploads/atocha_guardian.jpg[/IMG]

The Times:


http://216.93.175.73/images/uploads/atocha_times.jpg[/IMG]

The Telegraph:

http://216.93.175.73/images/uploads/atocha_telegraph.jpg[/IMG]

Well, shouldn't journalists present the truth? Is this acceptable? Or is it only acceptable to show how bad the US is?

Just curious.





Dread,


My first and last reply were a direct response your first post in this thread.


I don't no what more you want.




http://216.93.175.73/images/uploads/.....


is this url for this site

http://www.right-thinking.com/

after visiting the site I drew my own conclusions

others can to do the same
 
Re: Re: Media Bias Rears its Head

deep said:

Dread,


My first and last reply were a direct response your first post in this thread.


I don't no what more you want.


Nothing really....just amazes me though how I am willing to admit when I have posted something BOGUS.....

As you know I have when I posted what I thought was legit, one other time. Today I have to spend time defending it after you post what you claim proved I was taken in by a hoax.

Its all good deep...all friendly... But it amazes me....that I have to defend my post.....and attempts to link it to a site, which I do not share the views of and find much of it too extreme.

But seriously now....the photos are legit....and no matter what site put me onto the photos.....

I want to thank you for the link to the "Bullshit " site which gave me the link to the article, which gave me the link to the photos at the Guardian.
 
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FizzingWhizzbees said:


Nope. :) As I said in the previous post "editing photos is in general a bad decision."

I disagreed with the conclusion you drew from the photographs, not with the idea that editing photographs prior to publication is questionable.

thank u for clarifying
 
Any chance anyone has anything ON TOPIC to say.....since the doctored photos are real....
 
I don't like edited photos in newspapers
just don't post the photo if you don't think it's acceptable
 
The whole "point" of the media is to educate us all on what is happening in the world (lets pretend for a moment it is not to make money and make waves), and to extract information whether in text or an image is not presenting the whole story and therefore, imo, not really worth the time in printing the story in the first place. I can understand that people would find this original image very upsetting because it is. But THIS is what happened. These kinds of events are horrific, and editing for a weaker stomach is lessening the magnitude in some way.

I remember after 9/11 the SMH (which is one of the physically larger Sydney papers -cant recall what these are called) posted a HUGE close-up colour picture of one of the towers prior to collapse but after the plane had hit, and standing on the floor above the gaping hole was the woman who I have had nightmares about ever since. The image was one of the worst I have ever seen, yet still nowhere near a good pictorial summary of the horrendousness of the event itself, I'd imagine. Knowing that she survived the impact and was minutes away from falling with the building as it was to soon collpase is a thought I will never be free of I dont think. If I had known before looking closely at this image, there would be something so upsetting in it, I wouldn't have examined it. Now despite my trouble with this, I still firmly belive the media needs to show us all what is going on. We can't be led to believe these things aren't as bad as they really are.

Sorry for rambling.
 
The press in Israel avoids publishing images of body parts after terror attacks but they never altar them in any way. Body parts are not like someone saying f*** on the air. Just think of the families of the people who died in the attacks. What will it do to them? It may always be burnt in their heads. They will always connect those images to what has happened to their loved ones.

One can understand that a bomb exploding does horrible damages, a picture with body parts in it is not needed for that kind of understanding.

But on the other hand, the newspapers here don’t “doctor” the photos. They don’t publish them at all, or just blur the really disturbing parts.
 
I am not that upset by it, I reckon photos get cropped all the time and we never know the difference.

However, I agree with Dreadsox on the precedent thing. Once you begin, where do you stop?
 
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