Today a Teardrop, Tomorrow Weasels at the UN

What's the difference between these two cover pages? The one in the New York Post is much less of an outrage than the bogus image used on Time magazine's cover this week.

That tear on Reagan's cheek was added electronically. Reagan wasn't actually crying when the photo was taken.

I had to come back to this issue because it astounds me that it is not generating outrage — among both journalists and the public. I wrote about this in an earlier post. In a comment to that posting, Barbara Woike, a picture editor at the Associated Press, notes that we are indeed heading down a slippery slope. (Credit goes to her for digging up the Post cover.) In fact, some publications, like the Post, long ago ended up at the bottom. If that cover photo is not enough for you, check out the lede: "Weasel so-called allies France and Germany will hear fresh evidence today of Iraqi stonewalling, at an 11th-hour showdown with the United States in the U.N. Security Council."

This is no joke. (It's not April 1 yet.) The Post really did run that photo, and that lede. But what they did is less egregious than what Time magazine did. Most folks know that the Post is a screaming tabloid and generally is not to be taken too seriously. And no one who saw the cover photo was misled into thinking that the French and German ambassadors to the U.N. really are weasels. By contrast, hardly any readers are likely to realize that Ronald Reagan really was not crying when that photo of him was taken. Hardly any will know that the tear was added electronically. And very few indeed will understand that the editors of Time intended for the cover to be taken symbolically, not literally. The N.Y. Post did not try to hide what it was it doing. Time hid it very well.

Where are we headed if journalists shrug their shoulders when confronted with the doctoring of a photo in the way Time magazine did? I won't reiterate the arguments I made in my last post. But I submit that mainstream journalism will be headed to a much worse place than the Post — a place where facts are optional and the truth is malleable.

Does anyone out there care about this? Where is your sense of indignant outrage?

Global Warming Bumped by Anna and the Astronaut Scandal

Matthew Nisbet reports on his blog Framing Science that the week after the release of the IPCC report on climate change, the issue failed to make it into the top five news stories. According to the News Coverage Index of the Project for Excellent in Journalism, Iraq policy and events, Smith's death, the presidential campaign, and the obsessed astronaut in diapers, pushed global warming out of the spotlight. (Well, I guess it really doesn't get much better than an obsessed astronaut in diapers allegedly attempting to commit murder.)

As Nisbet points out, there was plenty to report on global warming in the aftermath of the IPCC report, including the fact that both British Prime Minister Tony Blair and German PM Andrea Merkel both said they will be pushing for greater action. But it was all Anna all the time on the cable news channels, as a disgruntled Jack Cafferty himself pointed out on CNN. On air, according to the PEJ, he said, "That’s the only story we reported [yesterday] for two solid hours and we weren’t the only ones. . .Her death was tabloid gold and apparently, we just couldn’t help ourselves.”

Commenting on the tabloid sensitibility of the cable networks, none other than Bill O'Reilly pointed out on his Fox News radio talk show today that when Robert Kennedy, Jr.'s airplane went down years ago, his network focused a camera on the waters off of Long Island for hours on end. They went with that story for an interminable period — with little other than wave-tossed waters to show. Maybe they hoped that the body would just bob to the surface. This time around, they got their body, when Anna Nicole's so-called "death video" turned up (showing her being administered CPR as she was rushed to an ambulance).

How could the single biggest threat to our planet's life support system ever hope to compete?