Love of the Land: What a difference a caption makes

What a difference a caption makes

Elder of Ziyon
09 February '10

The same event, as seen by by Reuters and AP.

1st Reuters



Reuters caption: An undercover Israeli police officer (R) scuffles with a Palestinian youth suspected of throwing stones while trying to detain him during clashes in the Shuafat refugee camp in the West Bank near Jerusalem February 9, 2010. Clashes erupted between Palestinian stone-throwers and Israeli police that entered the refugee camp, a Reuters witness said on Tuesday.

Click here for full post and AP

Love of the Land: What a difference a caption makes

Love of the Land: Media, Hurrying to Canonize Mahmoud Abbas, Overlook Inconvenient Facts

Media, Hurrying to Canonize Mahmoud Abbas, Overlook Inconvenient Facts

MK
CAMERA/Snapshots
14 January '10

Palestinian Media Watch in a Dec. 29, 2009 article by Itamar Marcus and Barbara Crook, reported that the Palestinian murderers of Rabbi Meir Avshalom Chai (a 45-year old Israeli father of seven children) were declared to be “Holy Martyrs” by Mahmoud Abbas and his Palestinian Authority. But the American media was AWOL on this story possibly because the story tarnishes the Palestinian president’s benign image in the media as a trustworthy peacemaker.

Similarly, only the Associated Press reported on the recent decision to name a Ramallah square in honor of the female mastermind of a 1978 bus hijacking in Israel that killed 37 people. A Nexis on-line search found only one major American newspaper containing the AP report.

The AP report quoted Israel’s Prime Minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, condemning the honor bestowed upon the terrorist mastermind: "This is not the way to make peace. Peace is made by educating reconciliation, by encouraging good neighborly relations and by fostering respect."

The media’s selectivity toward Israel and Abbas is typified by the so-called national “paper of record,” the New York Times, which, although it failed to inform readers about the honors bestowed upon the Palestinian murderers of Rabbi Chai or the mastermind of the 1978 bus hijacking, did provide space for at least one relatively inconsequential event: The Israeli man who at age 50 was granted his 11th divorce (January 10, 2010 Sunday, Week in Review, Pg. 4).

Love of the Land: Media, Hurrying to Canonize Mahmoud Abbas, Overlook Inconvenient Facts

Love of the Land: The Lebanon War's Toy Story

The Lebanon War's Toy Story

Honest Reporting/Backspin
04 January '10

Errol Morris of the NY Times Opinionator blog discusses with AP photographer Ben Curtis about toys appearing in photos from the Second Lebanon War. The interview was prompted by Slublog's 2006 post, The Passion of the Toys.

A child’s toy lies amidst broken glass from the shattered windows of an apartment block near those that were demolished by Israeli air strikes in Tyre, Southern Lebanon, Monday, August 7th, 2006.

It's worth reading because it gives a sense of the dynamic between photographers on the scene and their editors back home, what happens when a war zone is saturated with cameramen, and how photographers choose shots like this.

ERROL MORRIS: The good example, of course, is the Mickey Mouse photograph, because it is not a photograph that has been manipulated in Photoshop. And yet people find it problematic, regardless. People look at the photograph and think, “They’re trying to blame this on Israel, saying the country killed innocent children.” And then comes the follow-up thought: “How dare they! They’re anti-Semitic,” and so on and so forth. And my own two cents of opinion on posing is that often we say a picture is posed if the photograph suggests a view that we don’t like, regardless of what the intention of the photographer might have been and regardless of whether it has or has not been manipulated.

(Read full article)

Love of the Land: The Lebanon War's Toy Story

Love of the Land: AP's Caption Challenged Photographer

AP's Caption Challenged Photographer

Tamar Sternthal
CAMERA/Snapshots
15 November 09

Remember Bernat Armangue, the AP photographer whose erroneous photo caption wrongly stated that a Palestinian protestor passed out, even though he was holding his hand up in the air? (CAMERA staff prompted a correction.)

Once again, Bernat Armangue is caption challenged. Consider the following photo and caption:

An ultra Orthodox Jewish man pauses in front [sic] the Al-Aqsa Mosque, Islam's third-holiest site and known by Jews as Temple Mount, in Jerusalem's Old City, Wednesday, Nov. 11, 2009

Here are the problems with this caption, starting with the fundamental falsehood followed by two secondary points:

1) This caption gives the misimpression that the man is actually standing in front of the mosque, on the Temple Mount. Given the tensions surrounding the Temple Mount in recent weeks, the presence of an ultra-Orthodox Jewish man standing in front of the mosque could be enough to set off additional Arab rioting, both on the mount and in nearby eastern Jerusalem neighborhoods.

In reality, he is apparently standing at the top of the steps that lead down to the Western Wall. He is resting his left arm on something, most likely the wall at the overlook at the top of those steps. From where he stands, he is separated from the Temple Mount by the Western Wall plaza. Especially in light of the sensitivity of the site, there is a huge difference between an ultra-Orthodox man standing on the entrance steps to the Western Wall, an area next to the Temple Mount and completely under Israeli control, versus an ultra-Orthodox man standing in front of the Al-Aqsa Mosque, on the Temple Mount itself, which is under the day-to-day control of the Islamic Waqf.

This would not be the first time that an AP photo caption has incorrectly placed a scene on the Temple Mount.

2) Why refer to the Temple Mount as the third holiest site in Islam and not point out that it is the holiest in Judaism?

3) The Al-Aqsa Mosque is not known by Jews to be the Temple Mount, it is known to Jews to be on the Temple Mount.

AP corrected photo captions in September 2000 and May 2009. We await a November 2009 correction as well.

(Hat tip to Yisrael Medad, who noticed this photo on BBC's Web site).

Love of the Land: AP's Caption Challenged Photographer