It's not the timestamps, folks
It's EU referendum vs. the Associated Press, Reuters and Agence France-Presse over the Qana photo shoot affair, with the Jerusalem Post reporting from the sidelines.
And hey, why shouldn't I add my own commentary?
One of the points that the AP spends most of its energy on is the timestamp argument:
The AP said information from its photo editors showed the events were not staged, and that the time stamps could be misleading for several reasons, including that web sites can use such stamps to show when pictures are posted, not taken. An AFP executive said he was stunned to be questioned about it. Reuters, in a statement, said it categorically rejects any such suggestion.
First off, I'm with Volokh:
I don't think the question of whether or not the photos were staged has any bearing on one's view of the Israel-Party of God conflict (even if they were actually faked, not just stage,that would be the least of Hezbollah's sins). It also doesn't change my view of the overall situation if 60 (original reports) 28 (more recent reports of how many bodies the Red Cross actually found there; of note that the reporters at the scene quoted the higher figure basd on pure hearsay;) or zero (conspiracy theorists) civilians were killed by an Israeli airstrike in Qana. So long as Israel has taken reasonable precautions to limit civilian casualties, as it has, the moral responsibility for any death lies with the Party of God for using Qana as a staging ground for attacks on Israel, knowing (far better than Israel) that civilians had remained in the village and were at risk. So why care if the photos were staged? Well, if that's your attitude, why not just have Oliver Stone recreate the scene and spread those photos around the international media?
That said, I can come up with any number of valid explanations for the timestamps being odd. Maybe the photographers did not have their cameras in the correct timezone; or the timezone was not synchronized with the computer they uploaded to. That accounts for the hour being wrong. And as anyone who uses a digital camera over time knows, the clocks will skew until you manually reset them (NTP doesn't work so well on a non-networked device); my wife and I run into this when we take pictures on vacation and try to create time-based slideshows. So really, those timestamps are irrelevant to the veracity of the "story."
The more damning evidence is the variety of poses and locations of Mr. Green Helmet and the bodies he carries; the precision of numbers that Hizb'allah asserted were in the building, even without bodies being found - while it is possible they had a good census, it may be that the bodies are still under the rubble - because they placed them there. And, lastly, even if this isn't a Pallywood event, the fault still lies with Hizb'allah for the deaths of the civilians. Never forget that.
And, for my last snark, quoting from AP:
"It's hard to imagine how someone sitting in an air-conditioned office or broadcast studio many thousands of miles from the scene can decide what occurred on the ground with any degree of accuracy," said Kathleen Carroll, AP's senior vice president and executive editor.
While I think a lot of people think Kathleen is pointing at all the bloggers criticizing the media, I disagree. She is actually agreeing with us. She is admitting that AP has absolutely no clue what's going on on the ground, but doesn't see that as her problem. That's where we disagree.
