If you can't attack the message, attack the messenger...

This is an old tactic in the US, but its still disturbing to see it being done in the UK:

A right-wing British website which claims that the mainstream media coverage of the war in the Lebanon has been anti-Israeli and, by implication, pro-Hezbollah, has launched a fierce assault on the veracity of major international news agencies.



It accused photographers from agencies such as Associated Press and Reuters of not being "too fussy" about "adding to the shock value" of pictures which showed bodies being removed from the rubble in Qana. The burden of the complaint was that the photographers had been guilty of staging events for greater effect and adduced as evidence a sequence of date stamps on their picture captions.

I sense that the right-wing propaganda machine is getting a bit desperate in its defence of the indefencible.... they can't deny the dead children at Qana, and the 'human shields' and 'they are all Hezbollah' argument has lost traction, so now they are complaining that the whole thing is a Hezbollah photo-op by deliberately mis-understanding the role of time stamps in wire photos and claiming that the differing time stamps indicate the photos of Qana were staged.

Its an argument that won't change any minds... whether or not Hezbollah had any hand in helping the photographers get a photo (and its clear from the article and the AP that they did not) it doesn't change the fact that an Israeli bombardment killed 56 civilians including 34 children. This is purely a rationalization for those who can't imagine that Israel can do anything wrong, and are desperately trying to view every civilian killed by the IDF as somehow anyone elses fault but that of the invading Israeli army.