Monday, January 04, 2010

Random Means - What?

From a new series on photojournalism and fauxtography by Eroll Morris, It Was All Started by A Mouse, I selected this quotation:

...It [the war in Lebanon 2006] was a very unusual conflict, at least from my experience. I covered the Liberian civil war in West Africa, and you couldn’t get more different. In the whole of Lebanon, I don’t think I even heard a shot fired. There was very little shooting. There was no small-arms fire. There was nobody firing guns — I’m talking about the places media could get to. It was all from the air. You think of a war and you think of soldiers firing at each other. Nobody was using small arms around us. You’d walk around and all you could hear was this “bzzz” of the drones in the sky — these unmanned aircraft. It tells you that someone’s watching you, that you are being seen from the sky. And then you’re walking around and, suddenly, some huge bomb takes out an apartment block. It’s random. I’m not suggesting at all the Israelis dropped the bombs randomly. They obviously had targeting and intelligence about where they were putting them. But from a journalist’s perspective on the ground, it was random as to when it was going to happen. You couldn’t predict it.
And I left a comment on the matter of proportional response.

What will the next parts deal with?

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