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| Make Buns, not Propaganda. |
“A picture is worth 10,000 words,” so says an ancient Chinese
proverb. What I learned in a communications course at the University of Alberta
is that that sentiment is only true when making propaganda.
A
political party was holding a rally, but realized too late that attendance
would fall far short of filling the venue they’d booked. So they ushered to one
side all those that did come, and when photographed, the impression left was
that the room was packed. We expect visuals to be “truthful,” and forget that
there are many ways to make a photo support a desired impression in the mind
of the beholder.
News
media are (inadvertently, often) guilty of news distortion with the pictures
they present. In a disaster, cameras and reporters gravitate to the worst
examples of destruction and that’s not surprising. It’s only that those
photographs give viewers an impression that the destruction is general to a
locale, whether it be Florida, or Wakaw, or Istanbul, even Ukraine. Using such
photos in a news story doesn’t lie; it just fails to project a reliable context
for the event.
And then
there are still the many photographers’ options that can help to make a
statement out of a photograph: camera angle, focal point, distorting lenses,
shutter speed, not to mention the Photoshop possibilities, like removing or
planting people in or out of a scene, for instance.
I can
hardly watch movies anymore. Say a couple is making passionate love on a couch
in front of a fire. I’m counting the number of cameras used to film the scene,
estimating how many people are behind those cameras: operators, sound persons,
director, “key grip or best boy,” (whatever those are). And I imagine the
negotiations between the producers and the actor’s agents as to how the scene
will be shot, how much clothing will have to be removed, etc., and I’m
wondering how the actors went about explaining to their spouses, and possibly
to their children, how it is that they had to act out having sex with another
actor because “it’s my job.” (Sometimes I imagine one or the other actor
saying, “If we have to reshoot this scene, I hope you’ll remember to brush your
damned teeth first!”)
How easy
it is to jump start our imaginations, especially if we “can see it with our own
(or a photographer’s) eyes! Also, how easy it is to convince us of either a fact
or a non-fact by flashing a photo at us. A picture is worth 10,000 words? Not
always, friends. Not always.
“Suspension
of Disbelief” is a phrase we use to express what makes us able, for instance,
to enjoy a story or movie in which animals talk and act as if human. Quite
naturally, we intuit that feature movies, even docudramas are not unvarnished
news, that they are inventions. But we suspend this disbelief so that the
flights of our triggered imagination can become a source of pleasure, even of a
sense of what might be believed to echo reality in a new way, when we
rightfully call it art. Thing is, art doesn’t claim to be news.
Unless
we have a firm grounding in what’s logically believable and what traps exist to
fictionalize events to match our prejudices, we easily become propaganda
consumers. Take a growing consciousness that “experts” can’t be trusted,
possibly over a few demonstrable misjudgments on their part. Propaganda
includes the appropriation of such cracks in trust, and spins out every example
it can find that reinforces that consciousness. The current diatribe against
“mainstream media” is a case in point: of course they get it wrong and have to
correct themselves more often than they ought, possibly. Propaganda encourages an
“all news is crap if it’s reported by the mainstream” by publicizing every mistake
that can be found in order to raise a consciousness of major news being corrupt
or joined in a conspiracy to misinform. The purpose is to set up a binary: if
mainstream news is all bad, then the alternative must be good. Read Epoch
Times on line and judge for yourself. And be equally skeptical about “mainstream”
broadcasting; they make mistakes too, remember.
As with
the photo that misleads more than it enlightens, perfect news reporting is an
impossibility. Journalists have to be somewhere; being everywhere—even being
situated in a place that allows for filling out the complete context in which
events are happening—is simply out of the question. Furthermore, every one of
us is biased, a consequence of our raising, education, training and job
experience. That this makes suspect the validity of everything mainstream news
reports is the job of propaganda. During the invasion of Ukraine, Russia has
shut down all independent reporting, allowing only government versions of
events to be broadcast.
Seems
the majority of us don’t protest the distortions of propaganda until they touch
us, exact a price from us personally. How best to respond to friends who are
propaganda-convinced is not easily discerned, and reading and thinking
critically about what we read—and see on TV and social media—is not a slam-dunk
answer, but it is a start. Abandoning what Jesus’ taught us about love is definitely
not an option for those who claim to be Christians first, foremost and always.
Obama is
a legitimate American, John Wayne held harmful white supremacist and racist
views, Jesus was adamant that we should love our neighbours and our enemies, a
wall across America can’t solve immigration control issues, COVID can’t be
cured with Ivermectin or by injecting bleach, masking in public lowers COVID transmission
rates, having the most massive military can’t keep North Americans safe in a
nuclear age … if these things are declared untrue, then is there any truth at
all?
NEXT POST:
How to write effective propaganda.
