White not going to be fake anymoreFollow

You just quoted the very sentence I was referring to. I'm not sure what your point is here. Perhaps you should read the explanation?

Strawman much?

My argument doesn't hinge on that. It doesn't hinge on the photographer "posing" them. It doesn't hinge on the picture being taken on a different day, or at a different place, or any other crazy thing. All it hinges on is the fact that the photo doesn't show what the media told us it showed. That's it. Followed up with an argument that the White House had a hand in making the media think it showed something it didn't. Why is that so hard to understand?


If it's wrong for the White House to arrange for photographers to take photos of the president after a speech so that they can put a still photo of the president standing at the podium to put next to their story about the speech he gave, then it's doubly wrong for the White house to provide a photo of a group of people in the situation room, and make them think that the people in the photo are doing something other than what they were actually doing at the time so that the media can put the photo next to their stories about the thing that didn't happen.


The result is this. This is what the public read. This wire story was repeated in numerous media outlets nationwide. That's why it's a problem. The public was given a false impression about what happened, and it's pretty darn apparent that the White House had a hand in making that happen. Read the briefing again if you're not clear. They asked several times if those in the sit room could see and hear the firefight and Brennan just kinda nudged and winked at them.

The media told us it showed a room full of people getting progress reports (both audio and video) of ST6's progress. You don't actually have any facts that say otherwise.

And yes, I'm more than willing to listen to your theory on military SOP and COMMO. Please, explain to me why those are your evidence.

Sigh...

It's like you all have mental blinders on. Here is the first paragraph of the AP story which ran right next to the photograph in question:




How many times do I have to keep quoting the same damn story over and over? The media told us that the photo showed a room full of people watching and listening to the firefight in real time. And just to be absolutely clear, we now know that they didn't watch and listen to the firefight in real time. They just received progress reports of the operation periodically. There was a 20-25 minute blackout of audio and video from the operation while the Seals were in the compound.

Edited, May 19th 2011 3:08pm by gbaji

It doesn't prove what didn't happen? That the people in the photo were watching and listening to the firefight which killed OBL "in real time"? Panetta's interview (quoted earlier in this thread) proves that it didn't happen. There was a black out during the actual operation (which presumably included the firefight that killed OBL. Thus, the statement in the media about the photo is absolutely false.


It brings up an issue of trust because had Panetta not happened to say that a couple days later, the public would never have known this. We would still believe the false story that the folks in that picture were actually watching the firefight when the photo was taken.



Huh? It makes it a fact that the AP story claimed something which didn't happen.

Military SOP requires video feeds to be cut while audio feeds remain open. Again, doesn't really prove they weren't there witnessing the firefight, just that the article was dramatized. I guess the reason you're outraged is because this is the first time in media history that a story was written to be more dramatic to draw more attention to it? The story also says that they said "the minutes passed like days." Are you also going to suggest that no one in the article knows how to tell time?

Shit, for someone that goes out of their ways to write novels, you certainly don't seem to actually understand much of it.

Yet the AP story says the exact opposite:



It's such a standard procedure that Brennan avoided saying anything about it, and the AP writer wrote that they did have audio and video feed directly from the soldiers. So do we "typically" not follow SOP? Or are you making that up? Or did the AP writer make it up? Or did someone he asked about this tell him false information? Either way, the fact is that the public was presented with a false version of events.



There's dramatized and then there's "writing something that is completely false". The AP article did the latter. And it appears as though they did that because they were mislead about the facts by the White House press staff.



For those who *still* seem to miss the relevance, it's about the absurdity of the white house making a big deal about changing the policy of having the president come back to the podium after a live speech so that journalists can take still photos for their articles on the principle of being more honest while utterly ignoring a much more dishonest example of a photo being misrepresented to the public via the media. It's about comparative dishonesty. If one is so important that the White House felt they needed to make a point of telling the media they were going to try to change the practice, then why is the other so unimportant?


It's also about spin. The only sources I could find even mentioning the speech photos were the same ones talking about the situation room photos. So it sure looks like the White House is responding to those criticisms by publicly correcting the least important thing, while ignoring the much bigger problem. And that's kinda dishonest too.

I'll point out again that this was the story which started all of this. The Obama administration choose to make this a point. I'm just pointing out that it's strange that they are "fixing" a problem which no one really cared about, and concluding that they're doing this just to cover/spin the larger questions about the situation room photo.

Outside of some journalistic purists, no one cares about the speech photos. So if I'm arguing over nothing, then what is the Obama administration changing the policy over? Less than nothing?

Yes. And do you understand what that sentence is saying when it follows the sentence before it (and the two paragraphs before that)? It's called context. Stop being so literal. Ask 100 people what that paragraph means and 99 of them will say "The people in the White house were watching the fight live on the screens". Doubly so since that paragraph occurs just two paragraphs after the one that stated that they were "watching and listening to the firefight that killed the terrorist leader".



You are looking for possible interpretations of the words used that could be argued aren't false. I'm looking at the whole article and what the overwhelming majority of readers are going to assume based on the words written. Given that we're talking about creating a false public perception of events, my method is more relevant than yours.



Of course I do. Do you know what "context" means?

Edited, May 19th 2011 6:18pm by gbaji

Yes. So they are making a big public deal about "fixing" a problem which no one cares much about, while ignoring/covering for a bigger problem. Welcome to the point. At the risk of tossing out yet another hospital analogy, it's like when a celebrity checks into a clinic for "fatigue". Well, they really were fatigued, but they also have a drug problem. But it's technically not lying to say that they checked in for fatigue, right? As long as we don't say that's all they were checked in for, then we're not lying!


That's what this is. That announcement had nothing to do about the Obama administration being concerned about their reputation because of staged speech photos. It was and is about covering for the situation room photo.

If I said "The minutes seemed to last for days," do you think everyone in the article can't tell time? Because that's where the initial problem is. You took one part of a dramatized article and proclaim it absolutely false with no facts, just conjecture at best. But hey, let's keep going. Maybe if you link that drama filled story one more time I'll completely forget why you were wrong the other dozen times.

ROFL