:: NEWS COCKTAIL aka BlahBlahBlog ::
"Everything is being compressed into tiny tablets. You take a little pill of news every day - 23 minutes - and that's supposed to be enough." -Walter Cronkite, RE TV news. The Web has changed that for many, however, and here is an extra dose for your daily news cocktail. This prescription tends to include surveillance and now war-related links, along with the occasional pop culture junk and whatever else seizes my attention as I scan online news sites.:: 4.07.2005 ::
:: "AP Calls Criticism of Pulitzer Win for Photos Deeply Offensive" ::
From Editor & Publisher
By Greg Mitchell
NEW YORK As always, not everyone in the press and on the Web agrees with the selection of Pulitzer Prize winners, announced earlier this week. But what’s relatively rare is that criticism surrounding one choice this year has a partisan edge.
The Pulitzer Board anointed 11 Associated Press photographers as winners in the category of breaking-news photography. The award-winning photos were from war-torn Iraq -- and some in conservative circles claim the images were, on the whole, overly helpful to the insurgent cause. At least one of the photos raised an uproar from the same quarters when it was first published late last year.
According to a count by The Jawa Report site, “11 of the 20 photos would likely cause anti-American inflammation. Only two show Americans in a positive light.” By a count on another blog, called Riding Sun, three photos reveal U.S. troops “looking overwhelmed or uncertain,” two showed “Iraqis celebrating attacks on U.S. forces,” and zero featured U.S. forces “looking heroic.”
Columnist Michelle Malkin and the popular Powerline blog, meanwhile, returned to the controversy over the widely published AP photo of terrorists executing Iraqi election workers in Baghdad. Malkin asked on Tuesday if the Pulitzer judges were “ignorant of the controversy.” Powerline called the award a "Pulitzer Prize for felony murder." Last December it had charged that “the terrorists wanted to be photographed carrying out the murder, to sow more terror in Iraq and to demoralize American voters. That’s why they tipped off the photographer, and that’s why they dragged the two election workers from their car, so they could be shot in front of the AP’s obliging camera.”
The “tipped off” refers to the AP revealing that the photographer had been notified that a car bombing had occurred in the area where the attack on the election workers eventually took place. Contrary to the Powerline assertion, however, there is no evidence that the photographer knew anything about the attack in advance or, indeed, that the killers knew a photographer was poised and ready to snap that image. Indeed, according to AP, the lensman was 300 meters away. Salon.com quoted an unnamed AP source calling this charge of pre-arrangement “ridiculous.”
Today, Kathleen Carroll, the AP's executive editor, told E&P: "The allegations on these Web sites are complete baloney and deeply offensive."
As for possible political bias of the Pulitzer judges: They hailed from a hardly liberal group of papers (The Washington Times, The Virginian-Pilot in Norfolk, the Rocky Mountain News in Denver, and The Journal News of White Plains, N.Y.) plus the John S. and James L. Knight Foundation.
Read more here.
posted by me
:: 12:51:00 AM [+] ::
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