This
week Charlie Hebdo had all news stations on full alert, 24 by 24 (and, luckily
only 3 by 7). With all the street cameras and professional cameras capturing
everything that shivered or trembled, we did not miss anything that was moving
in our global village, for this occasion focusing on Paris streets.
We
all know meanwhile that the messaging of news casters starts and ends with the ideas
and goals of their financiers or paymasters and, if we are lucky, some
objectivity in between. This week, tragic as it was, provided an excellent
example of how subtle the manipulation can be, and how the objectivity suffers.
The
scene concerned the attack of the Charlie Hebdo headquarters. Two hooded man
get out of a car wielding AK-47’s. Street cameras or CCTV’s – presumably the
most objective recorders that we have – show a policeman lying on the curb, wounded.
The terrorists are running towards the Charlie Hebdo HQ. One of them stops pointedly
next to the policeman, who apparently is pleading to spare his life. Yet the
man in black aims his weapon and shoots to kill, twice, at point blank, then moves on
towards his real target.
BBC
World and CNN showed the sequence where the terrorist shot the policeman
repeatedly and singularly to emphasize that the killer was well trained because
he didn’t spray the policeman, but shot him twice with single bullets. That
sequence illustrated perfectly how dangerous, how senseless, how cold-blooded
the killers, obviously well-trained and radical terrorists, were. Indeed,
why kill a wounded policeman, a disabled bystander, with such a conscious and
determined act?
Al
Jazeera (English) disposed of the same reels, yet chose to use them
differently. Indeed, it showed everything except the actual cold-bloodied killing
of the policeman: three seconds, perhaps, were edited away. If I have to guess,
they do not want to show a Muslim purposefully killing an altogether innocent bystander.
It seems as if showing this singular murder would add something unexplainable
to the rest of the attacks. It seems as if Al Jazeera wanted to spare their
viewers this utterly graphic view of the loathsome killing of an innocent
bystander, by a (devout?) Muslim.
While
most often the manipulation of information is much more blatant and obvious,
this episode shows that a few seconds can make a lot of difference in the
messaging: editors, impregnated by their ideological purpose, are constantly on the lookout for “spins” that make information come out in accordance with their missionary purpose.
Therefore, only
to think that our media bring objective information is a blasphemic thought: to
comply with the ideas of the founders and fulfill the goals of the paymasters
(often the same) they all manipulate, grossly and/or succintly. A few
seconds is sometimes all it takes.
Grimburger,
10th
of January 2015
