I remember seeing the footage on the BBC. This overturning of the libel case and the fact that the the footage is indeed fake is (or should be) a major news item in itself. However, I doubt that the BBC will broadcast it thereby demonstrating that the (probable) findings of its own suppressed Balen report on the BBC's anti-Israeli bias are correct. I think that I'll ask them to report the verdict of the French court.

Allan@Aberdeen -

The al-Dura footage wasn't faked in that he was killed, but but by Palestinians. It's just that IDF was immediately and globally condemned for his killing and is still condemned for it even long after it's been shown that Palestinian terrorists shot him.

That a French court's opinion that Frances2's appeal ought to fail will hardly be reported demonstrates how dedicated to the truth much of the MSM isn't when it comes to dealing with Israel.

I well remember the 'Grieving Woman' (see link at the foot of patty's article) being busted by the bloggers yet NOT being reported by the MSM. Let's face it: the MSM collaborates in fabricated falsehood with Hezbollah, Hamas and anybody else against Israel. Every single newspaer in the UK (including the daily Telegraph) takes its line from the fauxtography duly provided via Hezbollah.

A tip to Israel: next time you are obliged to take action to protect your country, make sure that you have mobilised your internet resources in order to provide instant refutation of fauxtography and lies.

You are right to highlight these propaganda efforts. As you say, they should receive the same attention they previous, false pictures received.

However, are we really saying Fox and the Telegraph are anti-Israel? I dont know how many Con Coughlin articles you've read Allan, but he certainly isnt pro-Hezbollah.

"only the blogosphere showed any interest in vetting the obviously questionable images being produced in the Middle East."

Indeed, just look at this one, which fooled a few people even though it was obviously staged.

That a French court's opinion that Frances2's appeal ought to fail will hardly be reported demonstrates how dedicated to the truth much of the MSM isn't when it comes to dealing with Israel.

Indeed. Just imagine if it had been the other way round. I'm sure we'd have had special BBC reports from the scene...

Andy, I've read Tim Butcher's reports in The Daily Telegraph. Butcher is ex-BBC and it shows but I'm just amazed that the Telegraph took him on-board. However, the DT isn't what it was and I get more accurate info on the blogs so bye-bye DT!

Now, let's see whether the BBC reports on the opinion of the French court.

Comparing this story with that of Mark Steyn, it seems that France could teach English Canada a few things about freedom of speech. In France, it seems, truth IS defence, and the accused may take his case to court for a proper hearing.

Is the defense of 800 years of English Common Law now in the hands of the French?!

Pete, it's far from certain that the boy did actually die. In fact there's strong evidence that he did not which it's suspected the footage withheld by France 2 would have shown. Even on some they did release he was seen alive even as they were claiming he was dead. On footage of the 'dead' body his arm was clearly seen to move. Melanie Phillips has more details:

http://www.spectator.co.uk/melaniephillips/354621/the-al-durah-blood-libel.thtml

I have seen the footage on the pallywood site and the boy is definitely unhurt by the time he is 'dead', so he didn't die there. The father has offered to exhume the body so it would be interesting to see whose body and, if his son, when he was actually murdered.

"That a French court's opinion that Frances2's appeal ought to fail will hardly be reported demonstrates how dedicated to the truth much of the MSM isn't when it comes to dealing with Israel."

It has been reported on both Reuters and on the BBC.

It is interesting how dismissive the MSM were of blogs until this all started. Its all different now!

At the very least the MSM will take bloggers seriously. They have been trying to recolonise the blogosphere recently setting up CiF, comments on news articles etc..such is their concern.

The MSM airbrishing images of the Israel Hiztbollah war, staging pictures of dead and wounded, reusing that woman in frequent locations. And ensuring Israel took the blame for that kids death in a piece of footage that was really hard to watch, it was so sad.

Either the MSM agencies were hoodwinked by their correspondents or they knowingly printed rubbish.

All of this should be a major major concern to us all as the MSM ostensibly forms and shapes opinions and unlike blogging never cites sources or links to factually provided information for people to draw their own comclusions.

"At the very least the MSM will take bloggers seriously."

I doubt it, Alison. One thing I know: I don't take the MSM seriously. No need for a newspaper and anything in it is second-hand and possibly falsified. If I want opinions, then the opinions here are as good as any in the MSM.

Slightly off-topic, but there's something I've been wondering about for a long time: It seems to me that in this digital age, any audio or visual (or audio-visual) media can be photoshopped/edited/reconstructed or whatever. So to an extent, we have to take "on trust" the veracity of any photo/audio recording/video we look at.

Now, what if you're in the security service, and you are trying to obtain a recording of someone for whatever purpose, and it is an essential requirement that the people who will view/hear that recording will know beyond all possible doubt that it is the original, genuine, un-messed-with article? After all, otherwise, the intended "victim" could quite easily turn around and say that you have edited or tampered with it. I'd imagine that such tampering would have required real experts back in the 1960's, but now?
I'm just generally wondering how security/intelligence services get round such a problem. Do they have some sort of foolproof formats for making such recordings? Such a format would not only have to be "uneditable", but it would need to be able to demonstrate itself as such, so that its intended audience/recepient would be able to trust it as such. (It would be no good telling me "this is the original" unless I was clearly able to prove to my absolute satisfaction (and possibly, to the satisfaction of a court, with a defence lawyer trying his best to disprove it) that it was indeed so).
Just a thought. Any ideas, anyone? Otherwise, sorry for going a bit off-topic!

--No need for a newspaper and anything in it is second-hand and possibly falsified--

Very strongly disagree. While I love the concept of citizen journalism, and the watchdog effect blogs have over the Dan Rathers and the Pali fauxtographers of this world, newspapers and tv reportage is more needed than ever.

For starters, most stuff on blogs is derivative of whats in the paper. If there is no paper, then what will blogs cue from?

I know all the biases that come with a quality newspaper like the NY Times and a quality TV news broadcast like that of BBC World. Yet I buy the NY Times and watch the BBC every day.

No blogger could have covered the China earthquake better than the BBC did, the big bloggers ( Drudge, Huffington Post, etc ) had cut/paste of print media of that story only.

Big media can do other foreign and lots of domestic reporting very very well too.

If we lose quality newspapers in your country or mine, we'll have lost a lot. And I fear that we are slowly losing them. We'll be left with Fox yapping about some missing blonde someplace and a bunch of us bloggers yelling opinions past one another.

Buy a newspaper today. You'll be glad you did.

Tom,

"Do they have some sort of foolproof formats for making such recordings? "

Nothing is foolproof, but there are ways to provide digital proof of things like:

- this photo was taken at this time by that camera (assuming you trust the camera, e.g. it is tamperproof or tamper-evident)

- this photo was taken no later than this time, and looked like this at that time (more generally you can do it for any file)

- tom tyler saw this photo and it looked like this at such and such time.

Let's imagine that I had an audio recording of Gordon Brown saying "I want to irrevocably destroy Britain's heritage and traditions", but that it was actually a fake that I had edited together from various speeches. Do you think that there is software out there that could prove beyond all doubt that I faked it?

Or vice-versa, say I had an audio file that is absolutely genuine, (and I know it is because I made the recording myself) is there some software that can run tests on it and prove it genuine? (This is what I'm really bothered about. It's going to be about as useful as a chocolate teapot unless it can be proven genuine to others who were not there at the time, but if it can be....Oh Lord, if it can be....).

Phantom - your well thought out comments make the case for both to coexist. Blogs act as a much needed check on media bias, they even drive the news on occasion. Some of the big boy blogs force the media to report on stories they would rather not touch.

>>For starters, most stuff on blogs is derivative of whats in the paper. If there is no paper, then what will blogs cue from?
...
If we lose quality newspapers in your country or mine, we'll have lost a lot. And I fear that we are slowly losing them. We'll be left with Fox yapping about some missing blonde someplace and a bunch of us bloggers yelling opinions past one another.<<

Well said, Phantom.

Working in the newspaper industry and my family having done the same, i often hope that the industry is on its last legs. It is seriously in decline/shake up which is a positive step.

The only and obvious reason bloggers cannot cover more widely is lack of funds. To get that you generally wind up with some media mogul in situ and calling the shots. This makes a total mockery of the entire system as quality or something essential for the people. Unless you are a mug.

Blogs and the internet have seriously shaken up an industry that sneered at them. From the inside out its a joy to see them crap themselves. Long overdue. The blogs improve the newspapers and not the other way around. I thank God for that progress.

ps. why do you distinguish Fox from quality papers when Fox and the Times, WSJ etc is wholly owned by Rupert Murdoch? When he gobbles up everything will you still feel the same way?

Tom, dunno...there is probably software and/or people that can tell if it is faked. There is software that can match people's voices but it's not all that great. Anyway I don't know what you have in mind but if it is evidence of some crime then what you want is a lawyer or that who can tell you what the standard of evidence is.

Frank, may I ask you if you know any real secure form of online payment, PayPal etc?

The blogs get far too much reverence for something that consists largely, as Phantom said, of garbled versions of stuff derived from the MSM...with most of the rest being fifteenth hand conspiracy theories and pictures of somebody's cat. For every expose on the blogs there must be a million bits of dross and disinformation.

Where the blogs come into their own is where you have an expert talking about their niche - and everybody's an expert on something. This didn't start with the blogs - it used to happen on USENET that you could ask a question about almost anything, and back would come an answer from a person who knew a lot about it. The blogs have just made it easier for more people to join in. Also many of the people you used to read about in the MSM, you can now read directly in their own words, no middleman - even comment.

There is also a bit of a danger of people self-selecting only sources that confirm their own biases - which they can now do far more precisely than they ever could with the MSM. A lot of people out there are only reading their own personalised 'Daily Me'.

That's all true Frank, but still, the blogosphere can give out more information, if you're willing to dig a little, on the details behind a broad-stroked msm story. Local sources who are blogging away can be very informative.

It does excel as an easy place to find experts on any given topic - or cranks and crazies if that suits your foxhole.

>>but still, the blogosphere can give out more information, if you're willing to dig a little,<<

The Internet can, Daphne, but not the "blogosphere". Blogs are answerable to nobody and have little to lose from publishing nonsense and lies. The result is thousands of stories and uninformed opinion disguised as "information". Evidence of how difficult people find it to differentiate between blog fact and blog fiction can be seen on this site every day.

Frank is right: blogs very often just support people in their prejudices and prevent them being exposed to different and new opinions. The hurt many people feel when they encounter a strange view is another thing that can be seen here daily.

Noel,

None of it could really be said to be 'secure' - you'd have to be sure your computer was secure for example. To be honest the IT industry has massively failed to deliver anything secure - see this or this. At the moment the most practical thing you could do in that regard is probably to get a Mac. There are some really elegant schemes for online payment - secure and untraceable like cash - but they never really caught on and they would have the same problems anyway as they would still be running on desktops and browsers that sucked.

I suppose your best bet is to use something which doesn't allow unlimited amounts of money to move and perhaps which requires additional security when making a payment to a new payee. That's off the top of my head. I've grown used to thinking the problem insoluble without scrapping things and starting again.

That said, I use paypal and online banking and all the rest myself, but it's more a case of the cobbler's children having no shoes. :-)

Thanks, Frank, even if the news is gloomy (and aren't those links scary!).
I'll have to check out your ideas of ceilings on cash movements and restricting payments to known payees.

Noel, it's a matter of discernment. There is as much reputable fact to be found as well as opinionated fiction on blogs - this site is opinion, others are based on facts and numbers. If you want an unbiased take on any given subject, it's available if you search.

Paypal works just fine.

Bloggers aren't being paid for their work or doing it 9-5 7 days a week for some mogul. Its easy to distinguish the dross thanks to sources, easier than it is to distinguish poor masked journalism as Patty mapped out. Which is infinitely more dangerous.

Daphne,

"That's all true Frank, but still, the blogosphere can give out more information, if you're willing to dig a little, on the details behind a broad-stroked msm story. Local sources who are blogging away can be very informative."

I agree but if the blogs were really that effective in taking down bogus MSM stories then Melanie Phillips and others would not be writing in the MSM about AGW, for example. Her stuff is actually fueled by, and sourced from, blogs. Now I know we go back and forth on the topic here, and that's fine, but here I know enough about some of the stuff she writes to know both where she got it and that it is objectively false, i.e. mathematically wrong - I can't say the same about this French libel case.

I suppose it's all a case of caveat emptor - in an ideal world you would read everything and form your own judgement. But there will always be a place for a good editor, even more so now that we are all sipping from a firehose of information. I can't even read all the stuff that comes up in my blog feeds.

Frank - I think it's pretty rare for any blogger to unmask a false msm story, but when it happens, it serves as a good check for the media to more carefully source and check the stories they're reporting - especially ones that tend to emotionally inflame public opinion.

I think the blogosphere, with all its faults, has been a good balance for the msm. Blogs are generally opinion oriented, if you want your line of reasoning reiterated you know where to go, if you're serious about a topic, solid information is available. Caveat emptor is exactly right.

Isn't Melanie more of an opinion writer than a fact finder? I enjoy reading her, but I don't look to her for the unvarnished facts of the matter.

"Frank is right: blogs very often just support people in their prejudices ......"

Friday, May 23, 2008 at 10:51PM | Noel Cunningham

That's the problem that Noel and the left have: people's prejudices (opinions held prior to recipt of supporting evidence) ARE being supported by evidence found on the internet. An example is that the left would have us all believe that crime is committed at a uniform rate by all people independent of racial background, yet (white) people's prejudices tell them that it isn't so. The internet provides clear evidence to support that prejudice.