Enhanced Photojournalism

[Skybird]

http://www.spiegel.de/international/...509-druck.html

Not good.

Some days ago there was an essay on the terrible (=lacking) quality of German journalists - especially the young ones who have just passed journalism school - and their extremely heavy linking and sympathizing with the political Green and left, and how journalism has degenerated to just paste-and-copy from the other guy, without doing own research and not trying to verify and evaluate any info independently (not even knowing anymore how to do that), and that nowadays three quarters of the German pool of journalists are PC gurus and confessing Green supporters. Unfortunately it was in German only, that's why I did not post it. The tone of German mainstream media show these heavy biases, and very strongly so. I have started to evade heavily to niche media and blogs. Mainstream media nowadays sound like the official state television of the former GDR.

We have similiar strong tendencies amongst teachers and pedagogues over here, the union of theirs being extremely left-leaning.

[MH]

Originally Posted by Skybird

We have similiar strong tendencies amongst teachers and pedagogues over here, the union of theirs being extremely left-leaning.

So who do you rather be?
The good guy or bad guy?

So Sky-falling-in is now complaining that Europe is running out of right-wingers?

[MH]

Originally Posted by AndyJWest

So Sky-falling-in is now complaining that Europe is running out of right-wingers?

Question is what "right winger" means to you.

[Penguin]

*sigh*
some explainations for the non-Krauts:

It is neither required for a journalist in Germany to have a certain party book, nor to have a certain ideology. This also goes for teachers (wtf do they have to do with photojournalism?)
Same as it's free for any leftie to start a banking career, it's free for any conservative to become a journalist. I would really like to read the study which says that 3/4 of all journalists in Germany are supporters of the Green Party.

That being said: objective photojournalism is a lie. In the moment someone enters a scene with a camera, the scene is different, manipulated, you always have another person in it, behind the cam. People often act differently when they know they are being recorded.
Picture manipulation/altering is as old a photography, often used for dramatic effect or enhancement, especially in social or war reports.

I'm also worried about the quality of journalism, but as in any trade, personal thoughts should not win over professionalism. That's why I don't see niche media as better or worse, it is always the quality of research which counts. "Sources" who just quote each other or just report some little bites without the context of the original source are sadly common, the size of the publication does not matter. Though I have often seen small blogs, especially from the loony fraction, just quoting each other. Just follow them, till you find the original mainstream media source (which often is about something totally different)

I linked to a great statement by an ex-reporter who he even calls himself a socialist () about the future of journalism and its quality some days ago in another thread. Here is the link again: http://www.reclaimthemedia.org/journ...imon_testi0719

A little about media bias in Germany - these are the biggest national daily newspapers in Germany, in numbers of copies in 2011: (for the amount of readers, multiply the numbers by about 3-4)

1. Bild 2.7 million (conservative) analogy for the Brits: The Sun
2. Süddeutsche Zeitung 418000 (center/left)
3. Frankfurter Allgemeine 360000 (conservative) British: The Times
4. Die Welt 252000 (conservative) British: Daily Telegraph
5. Handelsblatt 136000 (business/economics paper - not green )
6. Frankfurter Rundschau 119000 (left-liberal) British: The Guardian
7. Financial Times Deutschland 100000 (business/economics paper - also not green) British: guess what?
8. Die Tageszeitung (taz) 53000 (left/green )
9. Neues Deutschland 36000 (authoritan-socialist) - ex gdr pravda

I tried to be neutral in judging the political tendency, though of course left/right is always a matter from where you look - however I don't see a terrible PC/left/green bias here...

(Source: http://www.print.de/Top-10/Top-10-Pr....-Quartal-2011)

Note that we also have many regional papers here which also sell a considerable amount of copies, many of them more than the national papers, but I'm to lazy to write about them too, you can have a look at their numbers here

Btw: here is the original article which includes some picture examples: http://www.spiegel.de/international/...-a-898509.html

[Skybird]

Originally Posted by Penguin

*sigh*
some explainations for the non-Krauts:

It is neither required for a journalist in Germany to have a certain party book, nor to have a certain ideology.

This I have not said. I said that journalists are a heavily biased, green-left-leaning crowd that leave the journalism school and do not know crap about the basics of their profession, regarding basic writing and research skills, and thus produce heavily biased politically correct opinion pieces instead of sober, independently confirmed and verified-by-themselves fact reports. I also mentioned uncritical paste-and-copy, which you especially see in internet media.

Take this, that also is just some days old:

http://www.cicero.de/berliner-republ...hr/54351?print

And yes, I stick to it, by political sympathy and voting habits, journalists of this new missionary branch by two thirds to three quarters are Green-red followers and voters.

What also should be said is that the political parties and minister presidents of the federal states take TREMENDOUS influence on the management decisions and content decisions of the state-run TV channels ARD and ZDF. That refers both to personnel decisions for prominent or key posts, and attempts of censorships in news reports.

The very very few TV reporters I may put some trust in, are all from a very old guard. They are a species that goes extinct.

I also refuse your generalization of all photos always being a lie, no matter how they are pre- or post-processed. While the photographed perspective is a reduction of the total reality it was taken from, the original article I linked describes a trend in digital manipulation that represents a far higher and serious degree of manipulation than just the way the original image was chosen top get shot. It also represents a further reaching intention. At least these three categories of image-making should be differentiated, I think: 1. being in a situation and just photographing what one sees in the event and/or situation, 2- then not shooting any scene, but intentionally choosing just some special, selected scenes and maybe even arranging them, and3. finally the digital, totally arbitrary manipulation of the RAW image afterwards, where only your skill in handling the software is the limits. The two latter are close to each other, and maybe identical by intention, but the latter allows more freedom. The first is the most distant both in intention, and possibilities.

[Skybird]

Originally Posted by Penguin

1. Bild (crap, Pawlovian)
2. Süddeutsche Zeitung (radical left/"progressive", very PC)
3. Frankfurter Allgemeine (moderately conservative)
4. Die Welt (centrist-slightly left)
5. Handelsblatt (business/economics paper)
6. Frankfurter Rundschau (left, very PC)
7. Financial Times Deutschland 100000 (business/economics paper - also not green) British: guess what?
8. Die Tageszeitung (communist, radical "progressive")
9. Neues Deutschland 36000 (authoritan-socialist) - ex gdr pravda

Corrected that for you. One should also mention Die Zeit (moderately left), Tagesspiegel (centrist), Spiegel (huge variance from conservative to very left, depends heavily on the writing crew doing an article), and FOCUS (turning news into showbiz mostly, I consider it to be something like PM - Peter Moosleitner's Interessantes Magazin...).

Explicitly critical of the state'S growing control over the citizens and the of the EU and the emerging EU superstate none of these medi a is, with the exclusion of Neues Deutschland which i simply do not know since I never cared to read even a single edition of it. - Truly liberal in the meaning of the original tradition of liberalism or libertarianism, none of these media is.

I personally read also sites and blogs and newspapers like this: FreieWelt.net, Richgard Herzinger's Freie Welt Blog, Ortner Online, Cuncti, Critical Science, Eigentümlich frei, Andreas Unterberger's Tagebuch, DetlevSchlichter.com, Wertewirtschaft.org, Ludwig von Mises Institut.com (German and Engoish sites), and I often switch to sites that get linked to in articles from the above.

And that are only the frequently visited German links I use.