How much is a picture worth?

 

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.