Enhanced Photojournalism

[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.

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...

So are you saying someone would have to be pretty far out on the loony right fringe to consider german journalism a socialist conspiracy?