Monday, March 10, 2014

Malaysia Airlines MH370 and the photo: Chicago Airport?

This post does not deal with the actual or hypothetical events around the missing passenger plane.

The post does deal with the reporting of the incident in the German press, specifically with the photo used by several German mainstream web sites in the first couple of days after the incident.

We saw the photo as a minimum on Welt online, Zeit online, and if we recall correctly on Spiegel online.

It was a stock photo, now gone, replaced with what seem to be relevant photos.

This first photo showed a Malaysia Airlines plane taxing on the ground on a large airport. The plane was in the middle of an overpass over a wide road, and in the foreground of the photo there were three black silhouettes of what must have been males wearing hoodies. The person on the far right was holding a small camera.

Filling up to a third of the website page, the impact of the photo was darkly ominous and very misleading: without saying anything, without a caption, the impression was that of dread and terror(ists).

Remember, at that point in time, almost nothing was known, except that two passengers with stolen passports were on the plane.

The combination of a photo that seems to show a plane on the ground at Chicago (or a similar airport with that overpass....) with the stolen passports is just bad journalism, period.

As to the speculation about the guys, they had European white male papers, so we leave it to you to go down the terrorist interpretation, personally that looks more like drug dealers or other criminal stuff.

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