The Shadow
Whether it be Fred Astaire dancing on the ceiling in “Royal Wedding” (1951) film directed by Stanley Donen or photo-shopped images being shared on the internet, what appears to be could be an illusion.
Such trickery via the use of a camera to manipulate visual images has brought into question the wisdom of the age-old adage, “Seeing is believing.”
Today, it is though one may be constantly walking through a funhouse where mirrors are distorting images, legs appearing to be fatter than one’s midsection while one’s head alternates between being pumpkin-like or pancake-like.
What is real? That has become the question that continues to be most difficult to answer with certainty.
The bottom line is that journalism is suffering from a widespread lack of confidence, partly because in the public sector voters are being incorrectly informed about this, that and the other. The spin remains the constant for grinding political axes.
Ways of spinning a story in order to support a political agenda are many.
A journalist may skew facts by taking what one says out of context, by reporting favorable information while burying negative information about a candidate, editing videos to eliminate visuals that may be harmful to a candidate and by refusing to publish information that is true but harmful to a candidate the news outlet favors.
Of course, slanting the news is nothing new. However, the platform that social media provides enables much more disinformation, photo-shopped images and defamation of character statements by bloggers, YouTube gurus and conspiracy theorists.
Recently, Alex Jones was fined $965 million for his false claims that the mass murders at Sandy Hook Elementary School were staged by actors rather than having been committed by a shooter.
Also, Nicholas Sandmann, a Covington High School student from Covington, Ky. settled out of court with NBC Universal after having filed a $275 million lawsuit for defamation of character following NBC’s editing its video in such a way to make the high school student appear to be harassing a Native American elder, Nathan Phillips, who approached Sandmann and continued to beat his drum directly in front of him.
The editing that kept viewers from seeing what led to the confrontation made it appear that Sandmann, who was wearing a “Make America Great Again” cap, was the aggressor who was smirking at Phillips.
Sandmann settled out of court for an undisclosed sum after having been portrayed on national TV in a negative light as though he had approached Phillips and confronted him, just the opposite of what actually happened in Washington D.C. following a March for Life event in 2019.
At UCLA where I earned my MFA degree in theatre arts in 1980, one of the first lessons that I learned in film school was that the camera can lie.
Editing film can play havoc with reality, plunging the proverbial dagger through the heart of, “Seeing is believing!”
