climate change Archives - Page 9 of 11

CBC Fauxtography

Kate McMillan did some fantastic work yesterday uncovering image manipulation by the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation on an April 19th story about the government’s sobering Kyoto costing. McMillan discovered that the CBC had cropped and applied a photoshop “dirty” filter to an image of smokestacks in Toronto to accentuate environmental damage. Not only was the juxtaposition of pollution and a story on Kyoto costing inappropriate (a less but still inappropriate image would have been a photoshopped stack of papers stamped “Kyoto” crushing the piggy bank of a Canadian family) but to manipulate an image to reflect a editorial point of view is downright unethical. The image was also used in a news story back on February 14th.

Pre-photoshop image

Screen-capture of April 19th story

Not only is the photoshopping unethical, it violates CBC’s own Journalistic Standards and Practices:

From section III, subsection 2:

Accuracy

The information conforms with reality and is not in any way misleading or false. This demands not only careful and thorough research but a disciplined use of language and production techniques, including visuals.

Integrity
The information is truthful, not distorted to justify a conclusion. Broadcasters do not take advantage of their power to present a personal bias.

Of course, this isn’t the first time that agents of news organizations have manipulated images dishonestly to exaggerate the news in order to convince others of their worldview. News organizations ought to be dispassionate observers and reporters of events and never should have an agenda of convincing the audience of the merits of any particular agenda.

Hello Steve Janke!

There’s a lesson here: never throw out the B-roll!

As some of you may know, I, along with Tasha Kheiriddin and Greg Staples armed ourselves with video cameras and stalked the halls of the Liberal Party leadership convention in December looking for interesting people to talk to and fun moments to catch on tape.

Steve Janke has the post of the day (already featured on Bourque, National Newswatch and Rutherford) about John Duffy’s hypocritical position on climate change. Duffy is co-founder of the website www.climateliberal.ca and was pushing the issue of climate change at the convention. As Steve Janke brilliantly points out today, Duffy’s position is… um… unsustainable as the former Paul Martin confidante was a lobbyist for the Bromine Science and Environmental Forum (a front for the bromine producing industry) where he worked to keep bromine off of Environment Canada’s list of toxic chemicals. Bromine is “the most effective heat trapping greenhouse gases of all” according to Environment Canada.

Anyway, do go and read Steve Janke’s excellent post!

And, now… watch the following video that Tasha was able to shoot for Blogging Tories during the Liberal convention.

CTV’s Canada AM makes a poor edit

Last week, I was watching Canada AM and would have spit out my coffee if I had been drinking some at the time.

I had just seen the program’s Seamus O’Regan interview Liberal Party leader Stephane Dion about climate change, the oil sands, the terror threat against the oil sands and then finally a potential election. It was a standard four minute interview which ended with some rhetoric from Stephane Dion, saying that Harper wants to make the country right-wing, Republican, far right, evil, etc… par for the course and standard fare for Dion. The Liberals have recently been pushing that very message in every QP breath they take.

At the top of the hour, they replayed a clip of the Dion interview which described the Liberals as a moderate alternative to Harper’s “far right” party. Again, inaccurate, but expected. Immediately following this clip, the anchor goes to the next news story to describe “far right” nutjob Ernst Zundel being convicted in Germany. It’s almost as if Dion teed up the ball and CTV drove it 350 yards.

Take a look (Youtube video):

In CTV’s defense, the same “far right” descriptor was used to describe Zundel in the previous top-of-the-hour news update (before Dion had given his interview – Dion went live at 7:40am EST). However, who cuts a clip of Dion describing Harper as “far right” and then gives the anchor text on Zundel describing the Holocaust denier as “far right”?

Also, what’s with the kid gloves Seamus? If Dion uses language to describe Canadian conservatives that CTV reserves for Holocaust denial, aren’t you supposed to call him on that? The proper response would have been “now wait one second there, Mr. Dion…”

For the record, this is editing on live television. I don’t think that there was any malice intended on the part of CTV… the result was just unfortunate. If this had been a pre-packaged broadcast, I’d be quite upset. With that said, I do believe that lessons above (and in the video) regarding language and kid gloves should be considered by CTV.

UPDATE: Should we instead be disappointed with Dion for twisting the misnomer (on all fronts) for his own agenda? Haven’t we heard Dion describe Harper as a ‘far right climate change denier‘?