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August 8, 2006
Conspiracy Theory
There has been a great deal of both smoke and fire lately about Reuters' use (and subsequent laudable retraction) of doctored photographs of fighting in Lebanon taken by Adnan Hajj, and of the possibility of much of the Qana photography (including photographs by Hajj) as probably being staged. I haven't really written about this much, other than to comment on others' blogs, but such lapses are of critical importance. The public's judgement is informed only to the extent that personal experience of the world or the testimony of others informs it. Since our personal ability to be wherever news is breaking is quite limited, and our capacity to directly connect to those who might be where news is breaking is also quite limited, the majority of the information we get about the world comes from the news media, either by watching/reading the news, or by talking to people who have. Indeed, in many cases, the news media barely reports the factual basis of the news at all these days, instead simply having on pundits who analyze the facts, complete with judging which facts are important and to what degree, for us and present us their digested and (theoretically) considered view of what those facts mean.
This is a dangerous situation for a free people, because we often think that we are being informed when we are actually being manipulated. Consider the infamous case of NBC's faked reporting on the "danger" of pickup trucks with side-mounted fuel tanks. This could easily have led to government-mandated safety standards which could have increased costs and decreased safety, because judgements would have been skewed by bad information. But this is only an example of news media being caught faking the news: how many times have they not been caught on issues where public policy was at stake? Or consider "Rathergate"; in an earlier age, without the blogs' fact-checking of the media, this kind of faked news could have changed the results of a presidential election, which no one can reasonably dismiss as small stakes. With that dynamic in mind, it is clear that faked news about the war in Lebanon could easily lead the public, because of its bad information, to pressure the government to make bad decisions about foreign policy. That is, in fact, almost certainly the goal of Hizb'allah.
After all, it's not as if Islamist groups have not been staging news for years. Staging news to create wrong impressions is the very basis of effective Islamist terrorism: create an outrage, manipulate public opinion, force the enemy (us) to retreat or withdraw from shame or fear, repeat. The goal is, eventually, to so weaken the West and Israel that we stop resisting the Islamists, at which point they can take over and establish the Caliphate (Muslim theocracy) and subject infidels (that's us again) to conversion, slavery or death. If this seems extreme, it is. But it's not me being extreme; it is the Islamists. Don't take my word for it: read their thoughts on the topic. (Hat tip and analysis: FrontPage Mag)
So Shane Richmond can make of The Telegraph insinuations or outright allegations of blogs succumbing to conspiracy theories akin to "the moon landing was fake" and "Bill Clinton was profiting from drug running, and had someone killed at the Mena airport to cover it up" or "the US government destroyed the World Trade Center on 9/11" (and sometimes, it does look that way), but that is missing the point. The whole basis of ridicule of such outlandish conspiracy theories is that they are so ludicrous: they rely on a massive cover-up by thousands of people, sometimes over decades, which only the intrepid conspiracy theorist has been able to unravel, due to the slight difference in shading in the bottom left corner of frame 184 of this film. No, really! Look closely! But conspiracy theories are not equally subject to ridicule when there really is a long-running, well-documented conspiracy afoot. And in this case, there is.
I do not believe the media is intentionally co-operating with terrorists. Amend that, I do not believe that most of the media is intentionally co-operating with terrorists. But I do believe that the terrorists have crafted a public relations campaign aimed at defanging Western resistance to the Islamist project to reestablish the Caliphate around the world; that that campaign is aimed at the needs, preferences and biases of Western media; and that Western media has, by and large, been unable or unwilling to see that they are being manipulated.
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