A great bit of reporting by the folks at Media Matters. In an article entitled: Fox News airs altered photos of NY Times reporters, they report a disturbing use of Photoshop to digitally alter the pictures of a reporter and editor at the New York Times who had written negatively about Fox News. Here’s the summary:
During a segment in which Fox & Friends co-hosts Steve Doocy and Brian Kilmeade labeled New York Times reporter Jacques Steinberg and editor Steven Reddicliffe “attack dogs,” Fox News featured photos of Steinberg and Reddicliffe that appeared to have been digitally altered — the journalists’ teeth had been yellowed, their facial features exaggerated, and portions of Reddicliffe’s hair moved further back on his head.
In this article they show the before and after pictures of Steinberg and Reddcliffe, and it is worth your while to look at these. I will say ahead of time that I am not one of those people who generally see anti-semitism around every corner. That said, what is obvious about these amateurish retouchings—at least of the one of Steinberg—is that they seem to use the same kind of exaggerations of physical characteristics that were originally made popular by Joseph Goebbels. As an example, here’s a picture I purloined from The German Propaganda Archive from the infamous film “The Eternal Jew“.
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So what was the purpose of Fox News changing these photographs? In the best case, it was simply a try to make these guys look a bit uglier. (From a personal perspective, I’m sort of annoyed that that they accomplished this in one case by making Reddcliffe look balder). In the worst case, they are playing into the old anti-semitic chestnut about the Jews controlling the media.
I generally give organizations and the people that comprise them the benefit of the doubt. In this case, Fox News has proven itself over and over again to be a highly partisan, non-fact-based news organization. That they resorted to ad hominem attacks is not particularly unusual for them—it is how they can best fight when the facts are against them. But this is an all-time low. I wonder how Bill Kristol, a main commentator on the network who is of Jewish origin, will react to this.