Al-Dura and the “Public Secret” of Middle East Journalism
Yes, it a public secret. That’s why as a media studies teacher in the 70s I required my students to use a video editor to create fake footage – to inoculate them against TV as anything other than carefully crafted drama. What has happened here is that another culture has weaponized TV and that weapon has entered our own media along the vector of the public secret – the insatiable commercial appetite for dramatic footage. Thats the secret – news camera operators and their editors are a team that creates dramatically satisfying footage. Action news. You want real documentary? Watch surveillance camera footage unedited. I’m NOT being cynical. TV is a descendant of the Greek theater. It is the nature of the medium. Even Fox shows ‘jinking insurgent with AK’ footage from Iraqi stringers. al Durrah reveals a repugnant additional market for any material that appears to cancel out moral responsibility for the holocaust. That goes well beyond corruption into a desperate moral inversion.
