The "Art of War" Manipulating Public Opinion With Photographs: ISIS, etc.

This is a fascinating watch and not as "wonky" as the title or You Tube Blub seem to want you to think!

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Professor Julian Stallabrass, of the Courtauld Institute of Art, talks to British Host of "Going Underground" Afshin Rattansi about how ISIS have used imagery. Whilst people may have become more aware of the manipulation of images in the media, it still has a massive effect on public opinion. He warns that news media has become ‘hollowed out’ by the introduction of more business values, and has a tendency to use the video packages handed out by the Pentagon and others, which are often hard to analyse independently. Embedded journalists, those attached to military units, produce standard ‘propaganda’, which is often used without acknowledgement of the source.

It’s difficult to find populations without cameraphones that can talk directly back, and he believes broadcasters should be using both sources. He points to the example of Gaza, where the flow of footage from cameraphones and the like did a great deal of damage to the image of the Israeli government. There have been attempts to subvert embedded journalism, with artists Chanarin and Broomberg, who were offered an embedded, taking photos for the military on digital cameras which they then deleted so they couldn’t be used, but exposing photographic paper when newsworthy events happened to create abstract images. He points out that their use of the military to create these images was as much part of the point as the imagery itself. And he says that ‘journalism is the first draft of history’, but by looking at a diverse range of media it is possible to expose yourself to different types of propaganda, and then critically decide how they relate.