The problem of media misreporting

I have previously looked at the problem that modern media, both MSM and online, face with reporting factual imagery and allowing contextual work to be put up for review, so that veracity of actual news reporting can be performed. While a picture may say a thousand words, when it supports a fraudulent or misleading text so as to mislead the reader into thinking one thing when another is going on, then a hard line between analysis and ideological propaganda is crossed. That crossing also happens in the purely textual realm, case in point this Much Undone In Rebuilding of Iraq article at the Washington Post (2 AUG 2006).

The lede and top paragraphs paint a sad and sorry picture of inept military trying to actually build things and falling behind schedule and leaving critical work undone. They are a litany of unending doom and gloom for six paragraphs: 500 projects not started, $2B of $21B left to be spent by the end of September, a poor handover of a prison complex job to an Iraqi firm. Why it is a vertible cloud of doom over the reconstruction effort... until you hit a key contextual paragraph 7 which gives us the following:

The United States has completed 82 percent of its planned projects, having spent $15 billion. Those funds have brought oil and electricity production above prewar levels. They have given 5 million more people access to sanitized water. And they have paid for more than 1,200 security facilities such as fire and police stations.

This is known as 'burying the lede' and putting a huge amount of spin on something. How so? Well let me give you a perspective point that they do *not* put in: the Federal Fiscal Year (FY) starts on 1 OCT, so all funds must be *spent* or fully *committed* by then for spending.

Now, that doesn't seem like much, does it? But consider that there is about 15% of the FY left and they have 10% of the funds left to spend. To anyone inside the Federal Government these figures bespeak of a well run program, contractors holding to deadlines and generally good oversight on fund use going on. The spending profile one would *love* to see in the Federal Government is a nice and easy 1/12 spent every month so that there is ZERO left to be spent by the last few days of September because the money GOES AWAY on 1 OCT and you are into the NEXT FY. Being a bit ahead of the game and still having dollars left to commit at this point that are well within the spending profile is *wonderful*. This points to a rebuilding effort ON TRACK and running well.

The next paragraph really starts begging questions with the stirring 20 out of 140 primary health care facilities started and the oil pipeline problem. They have apparently forgotten that to get people safely to primary medical facilities one needs adequate police protection, and to ensure public safety from rampant fires that fire stations that are manned and operational are *also* needed. So of the 500 projects left, 140 are health care facilities that need highly trained medical specialists, well constructed facilities and ways to ensure basic safety of those using it. And on the pipeline, the question of *why* it is necessary never arises. If the Saddam-era equipment is outstripping what the pipelines that are in place can *deliver* then you absolutely need another pipeline. And maybe, just maybe, the US Army Corps of Engineers is doing an Environmental Impact Study and Safety Study to find the *best* route that is safest for construction, use, maintenance and against leaks due to terrorist attacks. Maybe it is waiting for a good bidding process on this. You will never *know* from the 'story'.

So, even though the bad is put first and the good things are buried, the context belies the tone of the 'story'. Things, from a perspective of Federal programmatic spending and accountability, far from being hapless and hopeless are actually running well and smoothly. Those numbers do not happen by accident on multi-FY cycle budgeting. Nor are they reflective of poor management skills or poor programmatic capability.

The latter part of the 'story' to show that there may have been misappropriation of funds... well, let me say that this is also relatively common in Federal programs where different budgetary sources have different needs and some programs need intra-year shifts of money between pots to get the work done. This is the 'color of money' problem: money for Procurement cannot be used for Operations & Maintenance and vice-versa. Yes, money is divvied into particular expenditure categories and if need shifts you then need to do hard and fast trading between categories, all the while the clock is ticking because something unforeseen has happened that absolutely *must* be addressed for the project to continue. Being 'behind schedule and over budget' is the NORM for Federal work, not the exception. And this is even *before* talking contract legalities and who may or may not be used as a sub-contractor and who may or may not work on a project, and what happens if the contractor project lead is replaced by someone new that is clueless...

What world do these journalists come from where everything is on-time, on-budget, on-track and works *perfectly* the first time out? Even businesses have problems with that.

And in the era of the Internet this thing does *not* go unnoticed. It has gotten a response.

From Major General William H. McCoy, Jr. the man IN CHARGE of the reconstruction effort from the US Army Corps of Engineers.

To sum it up: he is less than pleased with the reporting done by the journalists in question.

After spending almost three days traveling with and being interviewed by one of the co-writers of a very poorly written article (“Much Undone in Rebuilding Iraq, Audit says”, Washington Post, August 2, 2006), I’m astounded at how distorted a good story can become and what agenda drives a paper to see only the bad side to the reconstruction effort here in Iraq. Instead of distorting the facts, let’s get to the truth.

In point of fact I would say that after showing the journalists quite a bit of hospitality, taking them to many work sites, showing them the good and hard work being done by IRAQI contractors and the effort to ensure that Iraqi's can control the projects handed over to them, yes I would say that 'ticked off' is a bit of an understatement. He laid out the programmatics for them, showed them the spending figures, demonstrated how things were going, admitted to rough spots, but put forward to these journalists that things were going rather well after a poor start-up in 2003. The journalists seem to think it is STILL 2003, apparently.

I thank Maj. Gen. McCoy for all of the excellent work being done and for having a highly competent and capable staff that knows how to get programs spun up even when they need to re-order them with changes in Governmental outlook in Iraq and Washington. That has to be a deucedly complex thing to do and they are doing it well if not superbly.

This is *not* fraudulent depiction with images. It is wholesale misrepresentation and fabrication of a 'story' using a cherry picker to get the few bad cherries while ignoring the tons of cherries harvested, then complaining about the few bad ones they had to search for.

This reporting is not journalistically 'fair', even for biased reporters.

It is propaganda to put forth a viewpoint on the capability of the US Armed Forces and, in particular, the US Army Corps of Engineers.

The folks at USACE have *enough* problems dealing with local politics, regional politics, national politics, international politics, changing priorities from all of those levels, estimating funding, put work up for bid, vetting the bids, ensuring that good bids are chosen from reputable contractors, ensuring the work is started properly and in the proper order, keeping a full accounting of funds and, oh, by the way, needing to defend themselves from hostile fire now and again.

Of the bullet and explosive sort.

Are there problems in Iraq? Yes.

Do I have problems with USACE on other things? Yes, I do. But those criticisms *also* take the multi-variate political schema into account. Plus they can only do today's state of the art, not tomorrows. They get lots of leeway for that.

Are these problems in Iraq worse than, say, the Dept. of Agriculture has on programs and projects? No.

Actually, they are probably doing a much *better* job than Agriculture, which *still* has not found a way to test for 'Mad Cow' disease across the entire herd. Not that they have been studying it for 5 years or anything....

My deepest thanks to the US Army Corps of Engineers for the fine work they are doing in harder circumstances than *any* civilian will ever know.

Disingenuous Media Reaction

The response from the Media, Mainstream variety, is that of disingenuous belief that the photos of Adnan Hajj or the possibility of large scale media manipulation by Hezbollah at Qana and other places are things that may be termed, as Dan Rather put it, 'Fake, but accurate.' Thus something that vaguely supports a 'story' need not be fully true as factual material, but, so long is it supports the supposition, it can be used in assertation that it *is* the actual fact. Thusly you now have folks in the media decrying that they 'may have been led around' but that they are still fully independent. The term from the era of the USSR that comes to the forefront is 'minders': individuals to ensure that what is not meant to be seen is not seen and that an individual, by being led around, will only be given a single side of the truth via what is revealed.

So when taken to a place by such 'minders' and shown individuals 'working' to remove 'battle casualties' inflicted by 'the enemy', the mere fact that this is a staged event would not in any way remove the 'truth' of the actual event being recreated. Perhaps these individuals will take away such truthfulness from something like Hamlet, also, or Henry IV. Fake, but... well in the first fiction and in the second altered fictionalization of real events.

In point of fact the Shane Richmond defense :

But were they staged? Well, it's possible of course. All kinds of things are possible. But it's very unlikely. There were plenty of photographers there, all competing to get the best pictures. Would the others have waited around as one of their number set up a shot?

As far as I know, Richard North is not, and never has been, a press photographer. And he wasn't in Qana this weekend. Nor was I, for that matter, which is why I can't definitively state that these pictures weren't staged.

No doubt that the individual in question is *not* a press photographer, but the vast majority of journalists of either the written or imagery kind are NOT battle damage assessment experts, either. The problem is *context* and always has been: editors, journalists and photographers *decide* what they think will best sell or best fit a *story*. They will prejudge their work and craft it to *fit* that story. By the time something known as news is delivered it has changed from a factual accounting of events to something being fit into a *story*. And, in point of fact, it is that pre-editorial judgment, especially by photojournalists and motion imagery journalists that is being pointed out to being the problem. Without ALL of the images taken, ensuring that they were, indeed, taken by a certain individual at a certain place and time with the camera indicated by the metadata, there is NO assurance of the actual data itself supporting any supposition.

The Mainstream Media throughout times up to just a few years ago was given authority to self-police and assurances that such was done with stringent adherence to ethics, quality and sticking to factual reporting and leaving analysis as a clearly delineated and marked reserve entirely separate from news accounts. That, however, changed in the 1970's, when going after the big *story* to gain headlines and offer pre-synthesized viewpoints supported by some data, but perhaps not all data, was given a go-ahead in journalism.

By not demonstrably accounting for all conflicting and contradictory evidence in an attempt to tease a the truth from the facts, the storyline dominated that screening process so that things that did not easily fit were discounted and discarded with NO representation in the final reporting. Add to this the diminishment of long analysis and longer oratory to fit into television *sound bite* space which attempted to do to audio what it was already doing for motion capture, and the entire realm of journalism was moving out of fact-based reporting and leaving analysis to others to that of putting reporters out to do instant analysis, grab a sound bite and then move on to the *next story*.

What is not taken into account, however, is the other meme put forward by the media that they are the ones giving a 'first cut' to history. When the history that they are putting forth is *already* edited before even getting to an editor, then they are no longer recording history, but creating a version of history. By not putting forth the complete suite of input as seen from many angles and reports by *all* reporters and putting the entire documentary evidence out for the public to see for themselves, reporters and editors are reserving for themselves the role of *analyst* and *intelligence expert*. One may cover many war zones, be through many firefights and *still* have no idea about strategy, logistics, C4I and other things that are not apparent from combat reporting. Further, when reporting about battle damage and its effects, by trying to attempt to ascertain *who* did the activity and then impute *why* it was done, this very same cadre of journalists and editors have taken it upon themselves to sieve out those things that they just don't like. Especially if the minder is there to ensure that they don't see it.

So when the question of: "Is Qana being staged as something worse than it IS or as something totally beyond the scope of the original battle damage?" the ones to determine that should not be, no matter how much front line experience they have, journalists and journalistic editors. No matter how many dead bodies a reporter has photographed, the emotional shock of it is still present and will tinge the reporting of the event itself. Factual reporting and leaving analysis up to experts with capabilities in these specialized area of battle damage assessment (BDA) and forensics is what the Media had promised to do with their reporting so as to distinguish between facts, reporting of facts, and analysis of facts using a report as just a single data point of eyewitness accounting. And no matter how GOOD the reporter on the scene actually is, they will have an emotional depth added to their factual reporting, that is necessary to allow that reporter to give their honest *feeling* of an event so as to have it taken into account by later *analysis*.

How did Qana become a 'story' BEFORE all of the facts were taken in, examined, time sequenced and otherwise given representational logic as to how things happened and when? Without even the most basic of battle damage assessment, seeing corpses is, in actuality, just that. And corpses emerging from one set of ruins in one place, and then showing up at another set of ruins at another place and time points out that ONE of these ruins is being used for falsification of destruction leading to death. And if forensic analysis demonstrates that the bodies, themselves, were not killed by either blast or debris fall, or have been dead since before the actual damage happened, then you have an entire event that is *staged*. But the public does not know that because the full and entire sequence of HISTORICAL EVIDENCE is not made available. Reporters and editors have already taken their 'first cut' at history before it even arrives to the public, because what is reported must fit into the *story* they are reporting. And that is even before questioning if the reporting of one *story* over another *story* is biased in and of itself in the selection.

In the realm of Intelligence Analysis there is this concept of having data with varying degrees of reliability and REPORTING on that reliability as part of the overall factual content of the report. A few things are worth looking at in this formulation of varying reliability of evidence:

1) Human based reporting, even first hand accounts, must take into account the individual that is doing the reporting and their biases. This seems simple on its fact, but, in point of fact is highly difficult when dealing with individuals who do not want to make their biases known. Without that the analyst is left trying to put *weight* to a report that is supposedly factual, but has less than perfectly known motivations behind them. So even a highly truthful report may be degraded from 'highly accurate' to 'somewhat accurate' and weighted accordingly. Without substantiating evidence a single report is just that: non-contextual reports are single data points and can only help in a larger decision by looking at the mass of evidence and its weighting.

2) Machine based reporting, would seem to be an area of high accuracy. And it is up to the limits of the machine, its data type and reporting capability involved. Intercepted encrypted information between two nodes on a network indicates the fact that those two nodes are using that means to communicate and intend to have some level of security between them. This is inferred analysis by the fact of the intercepted communication even *before* the data itself is decrypted. This is known as 'metadata' which describes the circumstances of the data itself but is NOT the data. The actual veracity of the encrypted data, however, must be ascertained *separately*, and that veracity is *also* added to the metadata. In another realm, look to digital cameras which are proliferating at an astounding rate. All such cameras in the last few years send not only the actual *data* of the image, but the camera type, f-stop, color space, and date and time of the camera signature if it is available. Some cameras can be fitted with GPS capability and will give the exact coordinates of that camera on or above the Earth and its derived time signatures from the available satellite constellation. This will have known error limits, and that is taken in as part of the process of later analysis. What many cameras will ALSO record is camera orientation. So, the image is not *just* an image: it has spatio-temporal axes, color space limitations, use or non-use of flash and a variety of other pertinent metadata encoded WITHIN the file itself. This metadata can be read and used to place a time sequences of photographs from that camera with spatial coordinates and representations of it. THAT is historical information that is absolutely necessary for later analysis. When captured and the data is not tampered with, the image with its metadata gives an *exact* historical record within its boundaries for image capture at a specific date, time and orientation. This *can* be tampered with and quite easily, so getting images from the field to an archival site *without* intervening data processing is a primary concern for these historical documents. When verified by procedural analysis, these documents are *more* reliable than human based reporting because the image, within its limits, is an EXACT capture of that instant or streaming set of instances.

By and large these two main areas cover the realm of journalism, but we hear less and less about reliability of sources, how the individual reporter makes their decisions and why they toss out some data as 'unreliable' and keep others as 'more reliable'. Add this into the concept of 'story' based reporting, and you come up with something known as fact based fiction: an accounting of events partially substantiated by some evidence and given credence by a fabricated storyline.

In the scientific realm evidence that is contrary to an proposed hypothesis or supposition must be taken into account. Here, again, data is examined and weighted by its type (physical measurement or derived from metadata analysis of actual data), source (usually from instruments, but medicine requires human based experiential input which must also be weighted), and limits (what are the limits of the measurements being taken and does the conflicting data point to something that was not being tested for and must be taken into account). While similar to Intelligence Analysis, scientific analysis places a primary stress on the actual evidence and derived metadata, which must be recorded accurately with ALL of the problems of the equipment, setting, measuring capability and it must ALL be reported. Any scientist that does *not* take into account the conflicting data by putting in the proviso language of 'within that which has been tested for, but other evidence suggests...' or with 'this other evidence was examined and seen to be outside the hypothesis being tested for, is interesting in and of itself but does not impinge upon the hypothesis because....'. These are reports, like Intelligence Analysis reports, that weigh evidence, look at them in total context and piece together what is happening and either accepts that the given postulation is limited in ways that needs better definition, or puts forward that the postulation is a more generalized rule with important exceptions.

This formulation of reporting is currently absent in the MSM, which has global organizational capability and should have readily available experts to examine captured data by reporters and offer a 'first cut' on the data itself and give weighting to it, and always leave open that 'more review may lower or remove reliability of the source material'. The reporting itself may be factual for the reporter involved and even the news organization, but if problems with underlying or supporting factual evidence shows up in the way of fraud, fabrication or even unintentional data or metadata removal, the actual 'report' may lose in its weighting as a single point of evidence. In both Intelligence Analysis and Scientific Analysis evidence is weighted, assessed and then put to the test via contextual examination and the final report shows a preponderance weighting after taking all of the evidence into hand and telling exactly *why* some evidence is weighted more than other pieces. A most interesting thing about photographic or video journalism is that the *background* to a scene may tell a more truthful story than the actual 'center of attention'. By correlating backgrounds and time sequencing them either via metadata or through known points of alteration, an entire 'story' may emerge that is far different than the focal point of a single image or video capture. Thus the reporter may be reporting on one thing and the background of the report may be telling a COMPLETELY DIFFERENT STORY.

It is not that the reporter is untrustworthy, it is just that it is much harder to move multiton blocks of concrete or repaint entire buildings than it is to move bodies around. The reporter is reporting on the bodies, the imagery is reporting on the entire scene. That scene has elements for contextual placement in a larger course of events which may totally escape an individual reporter, group of reporters or the entire reporting segment of the journalistic community but becomes readily apparent when the entire assemblage of data is put into contextual analysis. The recorded data via mechanisms on non-important things becomes the focus of such analysis and the actual reporters account given secondary consideration as a subjective point view in a particular place and time.

Thus the attempts at re-casting photographs, changing them, altering them and putting in or taking out of things is an attempt to change historical evidence to fit a particular viewpoint. It may be a non-fraudulent and totally valid reason: to crop and color enhance a photograph to show up on a wide variety of display media or for printing. That is time honored in its doing and editors and publishers must take especial care to ensure that the subject of the image does not lose its contextual placement in events. Problems arise with such things as: blurring backgrounds, shading colors that are not shaded in reality, altering the actual raster images to insert or delete material as part of the factuality of the image. These things are fraudulent unless directly pointed to or the image turned into a mere artistic 'graphic'. Graphics can portray many things, but they are secondary and tertiary documents in evidentiary analysis. The cover of a magazine, while looking like a picture and may actually *be* a picture, is a representational graphic made to be eye catching and sell magazines.

As I have pointed out previously in other articles: a greater problem arises with the photrealistic capability of modern computers to create fully life-like and realistic 3D models and give an image or time sequenced animation of that model space. The ability to do this and then put in filters and other post-processing to mimic real life cameras and video equipment and insert metadata then creates a massive problem not only for the news industry, but for the entire film and cinematic industry. Capabilities to turn previously filmed work into a 3D model space, represent actors within that space and then replace and regenerate the entire scene with new actors and voicing added in is a desktop capability that will be arriving and is already worrying to the film industry. When you gain the capability to have entire films from generated computer graphics that are entirely photorealistic, the ability to do this on a future desktop is pushed by Moore's Law. The Open Source photo editing tools available today would represent a treasure trove of capability to an individual 10 years ago, if they had the computing power to actually use it. Once the computing power arrives, the high end tools move downstream to a larger audience and users community.

And one can easily foresee the day of taking multiple images of, say, a neighborhood in the Middle East that has been damaged by bombing, casting it into a 3D representational space, putting digital actors in it for animated sequencing and then rasterizing the result for video. It looks and feels 'real'... but is wholly fiction. This has been a media industry worry ever since Photoshop showed up at a price range mere mortals could afford.

Adnan Hajj was caught by being a relatively unskilled amateur at this.

How many professional propagandists with additional tools in their imagery toolbox have already passed their work through unskilled editorial review committees?

And when, exactly, is the reporting that is supported by fraudulent or biased evidence actually 'truthful'?

And why would the Media worry about putting all of their historical documents out for examination? Do they have something to hide?


"Fake, but accurate." - Dan Rather on his analysis based on a falsified document.

"It's almost classic Watergate. It's not the crime. It's the cover-up." - Bob Grossfeld

Media Review Panel For Fairness In Reporting

The takedown of Reuters has been in the news recently via LGF and my previous post on this matter gives a quick summary of what the factual reporting media, both MSM and online, needs to do to ensure integrity of captured images, be they still images or motion images. The era of easily made fraudulent photorealistic models and animation is within the scope of Hollywood as of 5 years ago and soon coming to a desktop near you.

Today the problem is ensuring integrity of captured images by verifying source material and ensuring its integrity so that it does not misrepresent real world events by the necessary editing for publication. Doing things like cropping, rotating and adjusting color levels to give a good depiction across a wide range of non color calibrated displays or for print publication is an art as much as it is a science. We have seen in the news media, that *crowds* of people, up close to a camera, is literally one or two individuals deep, and maybe a total of 10-15 people for a 'mass demonstration'. Thus crowding the camera gives the 'appearance' of a large crowd and news coverage may not show the larger context of that crowd so as to properly let individuals know what it represents. Recently, much has been made of the purported 100,000 individuals that Moqtada al-Sadr has brought out in Baghdad to show support for Hezbollah, but few people report that the *previous* crowd brought out by him for his group a couple of years ago was TWICE that size. Without context one would think that his support was that of a large base, while, in point of fact, it is one that is decreasing over time. So, without context even properly taken images can lie by the absences of surrounding facts.

The problem demonstrated by Reuters in particular but the entirety of the Main Stream Media, is to take partisan reports from warzones and publish them as 'facts' and not 'assertions'. In point of fact, when dealing with a terrorist operation that looks like civilians, telling who is and is *not* a terrorist is a difficult thing. Further, when looking at damaged buildings in a war zone, it is difficult to tease out exactly which damage took place when and then give a good timeline of events. So the problem of gross digital fraud is compounded by selective access and reporting to make things 'appear' to be one way when, in point of fact, they are not. Add in unscrupulous movement of corpses from place to place to 'show' how bad the damage is, add in 'instant rescue response' individuals who happen to be at EVERY site of damage across a large geographical area, and one begins to understand that fraud is not a single event, single occurance act, but can be a systemic act to woo public opinion via falsifying actual events via selective and staged reporting.

This is difficult stuff to tease apart as it covers a broad area of expertise. I will touch on the high points necessary to disentangle such things and put scope and limitation on information and events.

The first thing to understand is that ALL information has a degree of reliability and accuracy to it. Even first hand evidential reports from eye-witnesses are unreliable, as evidence in any criminal court proceedings with multiple eye-witness events. These accounts may be factual and truthful, but have questionable reliability due to emotions and restriction of viewpoint or mental ability to take in the event. In the Intelligence Analysis world, reliability is always couched in the terminology of a report, and very few reports are ever those of being 'absolutely positive' about anything. When taking a group of information of differing reliability and casting them into context, some things just will not fit well and either point out a problem with context, a problem with the information or some missing piece or factor that cannot be determined. All work done needs a reliability and verification of information as a very first step so that all follow-on work is done with that understanding. In this case all digital documents of an image sort need to be taken in along with all metadata as to place, time, camera and individual taking them, and verified that those things are true and that the image can, indeed, be from that camera, at that place, at that time, taken by that person. This requires a broad overview of this evidence by an expert group in digital photography, imagery capture, motion imagery capture and able to cross-verify the types of color space of individual cameras with resultant images. As I had previously pointed out, the Munsell Color Lab at the Rochester Institute of Technology is a prime place were such work for industry, science and academia takes place. Further, they have background in such typific analysis and forensic analysis of documents. In point of fact RIT covers the entire gamut of digital media of all types from satellite imagery to print, and is a prime focal point for the media industry and academia and has a very high level of integrity and respect in that field.

Second, evidence gathering. Events take place at some place at some time, even if they are distributed digital processing networks, the individual processing nodes have space and time components for their processing time. Similarly, real world events have such components and to properly place events in space and time requires the larger overall geographic context of them. A bombed out neighborhood may not have been bombed all at the same time, for example, and so buildings still standing that are later brought down serve as time guideposts for limits of when events could have taken place. To do this requires a specialty known as BDA: Bomb/Blast/Battle Damage Assessment. This is a busy field and covers areas of military work and law enforcement with each having particular specialties and weaknesses. An example for blast assessment is that if it is of unknown origin a military remote sensing analyst may interpret it one way while an FBI investigator with ground level imagery may see it another. BOTH are needed to tease apart such things as: direct battle damage, damage due to indirect sources during battle, post-damage structural failure, IED or VIED use to create damage, and structural demolition via placed charges. That is a broad field and expertise varies across these areas. Retired BDA Analysts from the military of the US Armed Forces may be hard to come by, but not impossible and a look to civilian workers that had worked with such places as NGIC would be prime personnel to do the initial teasing apart of what is and is not actual bomb/missile/battle damage. The FBI Academy Forensics Unit in Quantico, VA offers expertise in skills that cover the rest of this range from demolitions, arson, IED and VIED, and post-explosion damage assessment on building structures. If these sources are lacking then alternate sources from other highly trained military organizations that are up to speed on modern battlefield BDA and National police/security services that do this work would also be prime areas. Again, retired individuals who are no longer primarily associated with this work would have the requisites of background, experience and independence necessary to do this sort of analysis.

Third, while only in-line, but FIRST in conception, is creating the geospace for these events and being able to march through them time-wise in that geospace. This requires actually having a digital overview of the broader region and then putting in analysis points that are time-delimited. As an example using Qana: one would have the general geospace of that town, buildings and structures from either city maps/graphics or from georectified satellite imagery, and then each individual photo given a time stamp and placement along with attached metadata of who took it and who or what is within it. This is known as geospatial intelligence analysis, and is done by the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency within the US and it has purview for all things outside the US for this work. Other Agencies do more narrow work, but broad analysis of an area and what is happening in it is done for the military by NGIC and NGA. They are, I expect, busy people, but providing wholly unclassified documents for this region in digital format is something they do for the maritime industry based in the US and they have similar capability for the State Department and Justice Department. Getting analyst time from them is impossible, but a retired analyst from that Agency or one of its contractors may be within the realm of possibility. Finding users that can compile a good GIS based timeline and place images and such in context will be relatively easy as nearly every municipality on the planet has such.

Fourth, analysis of individuals, bomb damage, and other things in context over time. Here the FBI and standard police forensics capability is a prime target for putting all of this information with delimited and imperfect accuracy to use in building the entire structure of events. These individuals will be the ones from the other areas helping to place individual photos and motion images from everything from Israeli guncams to tourist photos into the broader picture so that individual damage assessments and tracking of players can be performed. This analysis may require particular pieces of expertise from a direct color space analysis to software manipulation analysis from graphics arts experts to actual modeling and building of 3D models to look at how original buildings and structures appeared before and after events and to see if anything that should be there is missing or if something has been added. This could even require a virtual mock-up of an entire building or street or neighborhood, at least for exteriors of buildings, which is not too difficult. Many 3D game engines offer this like Doom or Quake, which has a vibrant modelers community to draw upon with many pre-made structures available, as well as the fully interactive Virtual Worlds for user made constructs, like Second Life, which allow a direct 1:1 modeling capability for *everything* by skilled designers and allows real-time virtual fly-throughs to examine various objects and their relationships to each other.

Fifth, is the final panel of noted experts in the various digital media, graphic arts and associated military and law enforcement areas. This problem of using fraudulent or tampered documents to sway public opinion is one that will not go away and will get worse over time. Unfortunately this year's SIGGRAPH is over, and would have served as a *perfect* focal point for all of these communities as they are ALL involved in it. That said, going through that organization to reach the acknowledged international and unbiased experts in these realms so as to convene a panel on this may be the key on this. No partisan panel of scattered individuals with expertise will do the job: only a cross skilled panel used to working within these realms and able to work *together* can put forward the necessary changes to digital based reporting necessary to create a new framework for that reporting. Media organizations and individuals will have an onus placed upon them by the doubts engendered in the public that reporting a *story* is no longer reporting *news*. Things that are *news* may not have a story line, while *stories* may not be things that are immediate news and are only built up over time.

In the coming era of digital media, when the cost of recreating and re-casting movies, stories and other things is no longer the realm of Hollywood, but is a desktop phenomena, the ability to create *realistic* looking events will blur the line of what is and is not *real*. The line between craftsmanship in presenting a good representation of an image and artistry in falsifying an image in whole or in part is the tip of a much, much, much larger iceberg that is surfacing due to modern technology. The framework for detecting fraud and insuring the veracity of such images and video streams is paramount as both of those are already falling into the desktop creation realm. The main answer is for all news and fact based reporting individuals and organizations is to *show their work* from raw images and video streams to final product. That may not be possible in all instances, but for most everything done today as reporting, the demonstration of openness and transparency by those media reporters in making ALL of their video and still images available for review is paramount. Cutting and pasting and taking images out of context to support a *story* is not reporting *news* but creating something wholly other in its doing.

Note to the MSM, RE: Images, still and motion, veracity of same [UPDATED]

The following is a recommendation to the MSM news outlets.

As a world we have entered the age of cheap and easy photography and motion picture capture. Like in previous advances in this realm, going from glass plate to film and from grayscale/contone to color, there has been a resultant explosion in popularity of taking images of life to remember events and give views upon these events. In the previous era actually doing photoretouching was something only professionals could do *at all* and was difficult to spot without a pre-existing image for comparison.

Times have changed.

The advent of microcircuitry and microprocessors along with high capacity color image capture has changed the realm of not only imagery capture, but that of processing as well. The first tool that gained wide acceptance in the digital realm was Adobe's Photoshop, but other and more specialized tools are available either as separate packages or via plug-ins to the Adobe plug-in architecture. Indeed, there is now an Open Source photomanipulation tool called GIMP that follows much of the path defined by Adobe, but is freely available and has source code available for it. And that is for the still image side of things.

While individual frame processing can be done via these older raster graphic packages, the tools for changing texture, tone and such for entire runs of video images has moved from multimillion dollar Hollywood Studios to the home computer, also. Adobe Aftereffects is one of these, and there are many, many more.

On the plain old viewing side, beyond these packages, there are a number of lightweight tools for doing basic photo work, like Irfanview, to do quick and easy reviews of images (still and motion). The knowledgebase for this is not only expanding, but the tools are becoming cheaper and more plentiful as knowledge gets encoded into software capability and put out on the market.

What this has done is put media outlets, be they someone's cat blog or CNN or Reuters, into the realm of needing to demonstrate openness and veracity of the images that they are putting out. A single cat blog will most likely not influence the course of Nations, but even a low-tier media source can, as witness the simple cartoons from the Jyllands-Posten in Denmark. Luckily those are purely ARTISTIC creations with identifiable authors save for that image of the pigparty used by the Imam to vilify Denmark. Photographs and motion images are, however, a different matter as they, at face value, are used to reflect actual happenings. The level of trust in photographs in the old era was high, due to the high level of skill needed to manipulate those images.

The level of trust today is far, far less due to the widespread acceptance of photomanipulation tools and their uptake by the larger community of computer users. So that leaves a news source in a quandary about the validity of a given image that they wish to use for news purposes. While fraud can not always be spotted, even by *professionals* immediately, for important images of events they *will* be spotted by the community of viewers of such images.

Charles Johnson, at Little Green Footballs, is in the field of photomanipulation work and has a skilled and trained eye when looking at images. Reuters has found that out. As did Dan Rather. That said, the entire net community has many such individuals, of many political persuasions and many outlooks on events and being able to pass a *single* photograph that has been heavily manipulated off as the *actual* photograph is relatively easy. Once spotted, however, the ENTIRE ARCHIVE of images becomes suspect as there is obvious lack of scrutiny by the media source on its images and that may be a systemic and deep problem.

To regain trust or to assert oneself as trustworthy in this age now requires MORE than putting forth mere images. Even three dimensional scenes with humans, shadows, skin tones, props and more can be done by low-end software such as e-frontier Poser. So entire scene creation is now available at photorealistic capability which can be added to either still or motion imagery, as Poser is also a low-end animation package, also. The tools for photorealistic rendering of scenes, like DAZ Bryce 3D, change that outlook as Computer Assisted Drafting and Design tools can easily export their designs and textures into these packages. Further, multiple images can be used to make a realistic 3D model via tools like MetaCreations Canoma, so even complex scenery can be made and recreated and then recast via other software. Each of these are LOW END software packages that have higher end packages available with greater capability.

These very artistic tools, used to create photorealistic scenes and then given a good going over by photoshop or its motion image brethren, are changing and will continue to change our outlook on what is life and what is artwork. From news sources, however, there must be a clear distinction. These tools erase the trust in images. To put that trust back in requires work and a change in outlook by the entire media industry for news and factual event reporting.

Here are some recommended guidelines to ESTABLISH trustworthiness:

1) Any given image *published* shall have its raw digital data made available freely for examination by the public. Do retouch and boost colors and such on the *published* image, but for the original, it must be left 'as is' with the entire metadata for that original image encoded.

2) All images shall have their metadata encoded with them. Most modern digital cameras give metadata as to camera type, make, model, f-stop and such like. Many others have further capabilities added into them to include date and time. All of that from the original image must be left INTACT along with that original image source.

3) GPS data coordinates and metadata associated with it, when captured, shall be included as part of (2) above.

4) When purchasing images from a photojournalist or anyone having taken images of an event, all images taken from all cameras by that individual shall be made freely available, even if not *used* for the actual storyline. These shall adhere to the first three, above. Copyright sharing with other media sources may be arranged and some small, but limited time to release given, say a few days, as most of these images are not 'newsworthy' but show veracity of the images used. Very few images ever become 'iconic' in stature, and most of those soon pass into the public domain by default at some point. Give the photojournalist time to shop pictures around, realize that they will be digitally duplicated at other sites that buy them.

5) All film processing, camera types and digital conversion shall also be covered with this, along with source of conversion.

There will be screams and hollerings over 4. This is the era of cheap storage. Get used to it. If you are in the news or factual reporting business and use images to depict a real-life scene, then demonstration of giving the utmost to make these images verifiable and truthful is necessary.

The era of easy acceptance of a photograph as the *actual* image of an event is now gone.

As I have previously written about John Kerry on this matter, what I say above goes for ALL politicians using digital cameras or having film-based images or photographs digitized. If you wish to assert truthfulness in the public forum of opinion, then the time has come to demonstrate such truthfulness about the things that are purported as being true. Images to show real-life and actual events require a high level of veracity for acceptance.

The time to do this, obviously, was yesterday.

But it is not too late to open the archives, make them freely available and demonstrate that as a news source you are trustworthy. Be it as a single individual running a photoblog on news events or as a Main Stream Media outlet with global reach.

Show it all or don't show it.

[UPDATE 6 AUG 2006, spelling and such not checked, sorry] Via email chatter I get this from Larwyn from Clarice: the individual's archive from Reuters at Yahoo!

That is *not* enough to establish transparency.

The entire legality of copyright can be satisfied via hosting services or from the news source itself. While an individual photographer may hold final copyright for profit publication, non-profit and 'fair use' for examination purposes is not out of bounds for original, source material. All of the images in that archive are officially 'published', which means that images have been cropped, resized and colors and contrast enhanced so as to fit into more generalized colorspaces of various computer displays.

Such work is done professionally to give good appearing images to readers and is a time honored way of ensuring that photo quality for an image is ensured.

What is now required is *context* of images so that entire, raw, unworked-on images are made available for examination and that their entire context as taken are available. Copyright can be worked out as, traditionally, a photographer may take 10 or more images for every ONE they sell. Most are poor or not well shot enough to make it to publication. Those, however, give context of what is taken at an event and the quality of work done by that individual.

Transparency is performed by putting ALL of that out for review so that actual veracity of what is published can be performed.

As Roger L. Simon said about Pajamas Media, and I paraphrase heavily: We are not 'fair and balanced', we aim to be 'truthful and transparent'.

That is the touchstone. Show us everything so we can examine *your* version of the truth of events. And that what is shown 'realistically' is 'real' or a fair and honest image that the minimum necessary has been done to give it to the public.

The next generation or so of software and hardware will further blur the lines between what is 'real' and what is 'created' to look 'realistic'. Time to ensure that honest and open sources for news events are used is now. And open the past archives of all images to let the public know that *nothing* is being hidden.

Only 30% of Americans are defeatist after THIS long?

After watching a bit more of the tube than I really thought wise over the last day or so, twice I saw Juan Williams on talking heads programs putting forth that: "30% of Americans are against the war in Iraq".

Dear me!

You mean after the purely *negative* drumbeat of bad happenings there, with not a single newscast showing a rebuilt school, bridge, farm, irrigated wetlands for the Marsh Arabs, people productively farming, children being educated, the flood of vehicles to supply domestic households with same, the lowering and heading lower unemployment rate, electricity supplies well past Saddam era capabilities and only being outstripped by DEMAND due to all the household electronics being purchased, the fact that Iraq is now a net agricultural EXPORTER, that their oil industry is hitting the hard limits of Soviet era equipment and that four complete provinces are now controlled ONLY by Iraqis.... you mean that ONLY 30% of Americans are against that?

Why, with such heavy media non-coverage of these things and emphasizing the police blotter, blood in the streets, 'everything is always going to hell' and 'Iraqis are incompetent because they can't stand up for themselves' reporting that IS going on... I am amazed that it is ONLY 30% of Americans are disenchanted with the war. With such continuous coverage of only the NEGATIVE problems anyplace on Earth would be seen in negative light. Watch your local news for an example of that.... just imagine someone watching ONLY your local news and trying to decide if your community is worth moving to. All those murders! All those rapes! Rampant fires! Robbery! Child molestation! And just look at the disrepair of the infrastructure and corruption of public officials and untrustworthiness of the local police... why would anyone want to MOVE to your community with such reporting?

What is the old saying... 'If I had both Hell and Texas, I would live in Hell and rent out Texas'. I could probably put that to a search engine and find it out... but my lady replaced Hell with Iraq, pointing out the cross-border raids, police no longer trying to do any patrolling near the border, beatings and gang problems, the trickling in of automatic weapons and protective vests. Of course the NEGATIVE problems of the border infiltration are not reported upon EITHER, thus trying to hide the problems.

So, Mr. Williams, how come THAT 30% is more important than the 59% who oppose illegal immigrants applying for legal, temporary work status? Or the 81% that want Local, State and Federal Police to enforce the Law of the Land? And what about that 55% who want ZERO illegal immigrants and 56% who want NO Amnesty for illegal immigrants?

Care to enlighten me on why a MINORITY of Americans should be able to veto a War when a MAJORITY cannot even get their Elected Representatives to do their damn job?

Care to do so, Mr. Williams?

And for all of those Americans who actually don't like the war in Iraq: do you have a better way to handle the problems in the region that will give absolute, proof-positive, verifiably BETTER results than what is going on now?

After the pull out from Viet Nam the entire region of SE Asia saw a mass exodus and even worse slaughter of populations by Communist and Totalitarian regimes that flooded into the unstable area. And, mind you, by then we had been fighting the North Vietnamese Army as the Viet Cong were mostly toasty... and had eaten through THREE complete re-equippings of that Army by the Soviets and Chinese, which crippled THEIR economies while OURS still flourished. So that solution looks to only cause havoc, destruction and despair. So a 'redeployment over the horizon' is probably NOT a good idea.

And seeing how well the UN has done in Rwanda, Bosnia, Kosovo and Lebanon, amongst other places, the outright abuse of those that they are protecting and exploitation of them while RUNNING at the first sign of trouble is a non-starter, too.

Our Allies are ALREADY there and helping us, thank you very much, and they do not want us to leave.

In point of fact the Sunni and Shia *communities*, not their sectarian militias, want us to STAY (hey if its in the NYT it has *got* to be true, right?) so we can help them get RID of the militias. Leaving would empower these bloodthirsty militias to bring true carnage to the streets of Baghdad and the rest of Iraq... and why don't we hear *anything* about violence all over Iraq? Lack of reporting or lack of things to report? Never find out from the MSM, you are on your own on that....

And heaven help us if our own troops are seen as effective and capable and not *being the problem*.

I do not disrespect Mr. Williams and enjoy his viewpoint on many things and even *agree* with him once in a while.

The problem is not that 30% of Americans do not believe that the war in Iraq is wrong.

No, the problem is that this is a 30/30/30 Nation in which 30% that support NEITHER party have been disenfranchised and forgotten. So that 30% cited by Mr. Williams is important as it represents ONE of the TWO parties.

But with neither party representing nor adhering to that *other* 30%, the Nation is left adrift.

That is the 30% that strongly support the war but *neither* party, as *both* have given cause for disenchantment by their ACTIONS. Neither party holds honorable positions nor even sticks by those positions that they consider to have *been* foundations of their party. In short there is a missing 30% that is saying that both the other 30% folks have divvied up the Nation to their own benefit and no longer represent All of the People.

These are the people who support the Nation, but have walked out on the two party system.

Neither party presents *solutions* to problems and is willing to put those solutions to the test.

Like actually having the police at ALL levels follow the Laws of the Land.

Like defending the borders.

Like ensuring that this Nation stands for and WITH its Friends and Allies, while doing its best to secure itself and them and NOT degrade liberty in that doing.

It is a 50/50 Nation because of *disgust* with both parties, both ideologies, both extremist wings, both sets of politicians that keep on coming up with ways to *ensure* that they get re-elected first, send goodies home as bribes second, secure themselves against inquiry third, and put the security of the Nation DEAD LAST.

Vehement disgust at both these parties that do not stand FOR the Nation.

And because neither party, no MSM group, no 'non-aligned' or 'independent' organization that DEPENDS upon the status quo will ASK that... it goes unasked and unanswered.

Who were these people that walked out of the political system starting in the 1960's?

Why have they brought up their children to *distrust* the two party system, but love their Nation?

And what are *they* thinking about Iraq, Israel, Denmark, and the security of the borders?

And what happens when they finally get fed up enough to *do* something?

And why are the two parties aiming to get that 30% mad enough so that those questions can be answered?

Welcome to the Summer of Our Discontent...

I hope it is not followed by the Fall of Building Fury.