BY DAN
KENNEDY
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Wednesday, May 12, 2004
MORE ON THOSE FAKE RAPE
PHOTOS. This
is going to be a bigger story than I thought. (Hardly the first time
that's happened!) Matt Drudge has posted
an image from an earlier edition of today's Boston Globe in
which the photo of the fake pictures of American soldiers raping
Iraqi women was run bigger - big enough so that their graphic nature
is more evident, even to my aging eyes - and in which the headline
ended with "Photos Purported to Show Abuse," a rather different spin
from "Councilor Takes Up Iraq Issue."
Boston Herald columnist
Howie Carr was going nuts on his WRKO (AM 680) talk show this
afternoon, repeatedly accusing the Globe of "libeling"
American soldiers. Boston City Councilor Chuck Turner called in and
declined Carr's invitation to apologize. I wasn't rolling tape, but
essentially Turner said that he didn't want the press to publish the
photos, he simply wanted news organizations to attempt to verify
their authenticity.
Of course, that completely
contradicts this Turner quote in the Globe story: "The
American people have a right and responsibility to see the pictures."
But never mind.
Word is that the Herald's
"Inside Track" is going after the Globe tomorrow morning.
Tomorrow is also Mike Barnicle's turn to write. Will he resist the
urge to pile on his former employer?
Now, huffing and puffing aside, I
still think the two most important facts are these:
1. Donovan Slack's story is
completely legitimate, making it clear that there was no way of
authenticating the photos that Turner and community activist Sadiki
Kambon showed the media, and even raising the possibility that it was
all an Internet fraud - as it indeed turned out to be. You could
argue that the Globe shouldn't have run the story, but a
newspaper does not have to defend covering a City Hall news
conference called by a well-known elected official. The issue is
how the Globe covered it, and in that regard, there is
no issue. Carr himself admitted as much on the air today.
2. Which brings us to the George
Rizer photo of Turner and Kambon showing those fake images to the
media. I'll wait to see what the Globe says tomorrow, but I'm
willing to bet that no one even looked at those tiny images - that
the subjects of the photo were Turner and Kambon, and that that's as
far as anyone thought things through. Obviously the Globe blew
it, but there's no way anyone in that newsroom deliberately ran
photos of a gang rape.
posted at 8:27 PM |
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MEDIA LOG ARCHIVES
Dan Kennedy is senior writer and media critic for the Boston Phoenix.
