Saturday, March 10, 2007

Ministry of TRVTH

Herewith the military explaining why it was perfectly all right to force a couple of freelancers working for AP to delete photos and video taken after some unpleasantness in Afghanistan last week:

"When untrained people take photographs or video, there is a very real risk that the images or videography will capture visual details that are not as they originally were," he said. "If such visual media are subsequently used as part of the public record to document an event like this, then public conclusions about such a serious event can be falsely made."

This really doesn't need further comment, unless anybody wanted to bring up the growing body of evidence pointing to the role press freedom plays in the "democratic peace" and in democratization in general. Would somebody in the chain of command care to remind Col. Klink here that camera-grabbing is properly the province of the KGB, which was supposed to have left Afghanistan a ways back?

1 Comments:

Blogger melissa angle said...

And who decides who's trained and who's not? I doubt very much that our military is more trained in photography than the freelancers hired by AP. And what if they hadn't been freelancers? Would that have solved the problem? I doubt it.

11:49 AM, March 11, 2007  

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