The photograph shows five hype-looking Lebanese youngsters, seemingly wealthy and seemingly oblivious to the surrounding destruction, driving by a torn-down district in Southern Beirut in a red convertible the day after the ceasefire.

“But the photo is not all it seems - nor does the caption that was sent with it to Getty Images, the agency for which Mr Platt works, accurately convey its content,” reports Ferry Biedermann, who wrote the FT article.

The caption reads as follows:


"Affluent Lebanese drive down the street to look at a destroyed neighborhood, August 15 2006 in southern Beirut, Lebanon. As the United Nations-brokered ceasefire between Israel and Hizbollah enters its first day, thousands of Lebanese returned to their homes and villages."

But this makes “a distinction between the people looking at the damage and the people returning home,” comments Biedermann. In fact, four of the five people in the car do live in or near those neighborhoods. In fact, three of them were returning to the neighborhood to see what remained of their own shattered house, not to look contemptuously upon the destruction.

"Our house was still there but all the windows and doors were blown out and everything was covered with dust and gravel," Bissan – holding her mobile phone in the back of the car - recalled recently.

So the picture and its caption didn’t accurately convey the reality they were depicting. So there was a problem at some point in the editorial process, whether it was in the semantics of the caption, the context of the picture, or even the choice of the picture.

The real question is: does this picture still have a journalistic value although what is represented and perceived doesn’t exactly match the reality of the subjects who were photographed?

This is where the debate enters murky waters, in which two journalistic necessities may have a hard time asserting themselves: on one side accuracy and integrity – always convey the ‘truth’ of a story – , on the other the depiction of an ‘illustrative’ truth, which serves a journalistic purpose by throwing light onto another relevant issue.

This isn’t to say that the latter should trump the first, because any deliberate use of misperception or ambiguity, though it may be sincerely meant to inform the public, can lead to obvious abuse and perverse effects. In this case the harm done was relatively minor, as the subjects simply felt they were misrepresented, with little or no consequence – the opposite is easily imaginable in other instances.

Yet the picture can have journalistic value. This is the stance taken by the editor of Lebanon’s Agenda Culturel, which published the picture on its cover.

"This is not an image that represents the war. It represents the day after the war and the divisions in the country. Unfortunately, it is still relevant."

Relevant, yes. But if this picture is used to depict the social realities of Lebannon, not the war, then it must be carried in proper context – along every step of the editorial process.

Source: Financial Times – Courrier International