UK Telegraph Tries its Hand At Anti-Israel Fauxtography

Not all fauxtography involves doctoring of recent news photographs; sometimes news sources take an old picture and change the context which also is using photographs to fake a news story. For example the picture below was taken by the Associated Press on January 14, 2009, right after the end of the most recent Israeli war with Hamas.

Last week the UK Daily Telegraph ran an article about the Gaza Blockade, this is how the article looked:

Does the picture look familiar? That’s because it is the same exact photograph from two years ago. This time the caption says:

The blockade prevents Gaza from exporting any goods, putting a crippling squeeze on the local economy, and restricts imports to a limited amount of basic humanitarian aid Photo: AP

There is the possibility the Telegraph used a two-year-old picture because they were just too lazy to find a new one. But, more likely is that the newspaper couldn’t find a new photograph because there is no humanitarian crisis in Gaza.

“The United Nations says the Israeli blockade has caused a humanitarian crisis in Gaza, an allegation Israel denies.”That is not what the United Nations said. In February the UN’s envoy to the Middle East Robert Serry visited the area and proclaimed “There is no humanitarian problem in Gaza.”

Perhaps the Telegraph would have been better off using the photos below from the Palestinian website PalTalk, which present a totally different picture of Gaza than the anti-Israel mainstream media:

Gaza Residents shop for more than just clothes. Further down on the same Paltalk page one can see:

The caption topping the picture above translates as:

Shopping and buying Alvake and nuts and needed to receive holiday

There was also some Easter shopping going on, according to a translation of the caption at the top of these next Paltalk photographs describes them as people buying cakes and sweets for Easter.

They say a picture is worth a thousand words, but sometimes to the mainstream media, a picture is worth a thousand lies as they use old photos to tell lies about to today’s news. The Telegraph used two-year-old photographs to paint a false picture of what is happening in Gaza today. It’s not a matter of availability; the real truth is out there, if only the mainstream media cared enough to look for it.

After protests lead by the media watchdog site Honest Reporting, the Telegraph has changed the picture to:

Not to be prevented from telling the story without bias, they used a picture of a terrorist entering one of the tunnels Hamas uses to smuggle weapons across the Egyptian border but gives it a benign caption:

A Palestinian tunnel worker is lowered into one of the tunnels on the Egyptian border.

It seems every time one hole of bias is plugged, another leak of misinformation springs up.