August 19, 2006

Green Helmet and Qana Media Show

EU Referendum has been doing much of the heavy lifting in the investigation and reporting on the corruption of the media and their manipulation by Hezbollah in Lebanon. They have focused on the events at Qana, and have dedicated a page to tracking and reporting daily updates on the Qana story. Now all their evidence and considerable reportage is assembled in report form.

After observing the suspect behavior of Green Helmet, the omnipresent rescue worker, and others, and as evidence of discrepancies in media accounts of the incident began to surface in the blogosphere, the EU Referendum dug deeper...

...we decided to carry out an investigation - not into the events at Qana pertaining to the air raid. We have no view on these. Our investigation is exclusively confined to the events during the subsequent rescue and recovery phase, to determine whether some had been staged for the benefit of the media (and for the propaganda purposes of Hezbolla). Also, we sought to determine whether the media had been complicit in any staging, thereby exploiting a situation and, perhaps unwittingly, serving the interests of Hezbollah, which seemed keen to make propaganda capital out of the incident.

After three weeks of intensive work, with the active assistance and co-operation of the internet community - often called the "blogosphere" - we now believe we have enough evidence confidently to assert that many of the incidents recorded in visual form by the media were indeed staged. In fact, we feel we can go further. In our view, the bulk of the rescue and recovery effort at Qana on 30 July was turned into a perverted propaganda exercise by Hisbolla. The site, in effect, became one vast, grotesque film-set on which a macabre drama was played out to a willing and complict media, which actively co-operated in the production and exploited the results.

What follows is a mountain of evidence that demonstrates depressingly why Hezbollah is winning. They are both media savvy and beyond shame. The "camera runs" are a particularly cynical and disgusting bit of propaganda, as the staged relay race for the world media exploits the dead body of a child, and actors, emoting on cue, pose for Pulitzer-hungry photographers and editors.

It's an important story when the media is presenting false images and passing it off as news journalism.

Related:
Video of Green Helmet directing film.

Speaking of heavy lifting, Charles Johnson should really be credited on any post dealing with this issue.

UPDATE 8/20:
Via Hot Air, two links to more reporting of media distortion in war coverage. The American Thinker is calling this one The Pieta Pose. And don't miss the E&P essay by David Permutter.

Posted by dan at August 19, 2006 8:45 PM