Why Murdoch Running NatGeo Is Poison For What's Left Of Photojournalism - DeSmog Blog

[GliderGuider]

1. I spent almost 20 years working as a photojournalist in the 70s and 80s

The NatGeo photographers were some of my greatest influences. I've been watching the tragedy of stock photography unfold ever since, and it is a great weight on my heart. From media consolidation and the gutting of standards, to the embedding of war correspondents and the prohibition of photographic documentation of environmental and animal-rights abuses, the visuals available to the public are being very carefully managed to present a worldview favourable to the powers that be.

The prioritization of image management, more even than text management, speaks to the psychological awareness of those charged with managing our perceptions. Unlike text, whose meaning requires interpretation by the language centers of our brains, images require much less mental pre-processing. Their meaning is instantly and directly available to our emotional limbic systems. This makes images many times more powerful than text - which incidentally helps to explain the social power of TV compared to newspapers.

When images presents an unpalatable truth, their power represents a dire threat to those at the tip of the social hierarchy - those very people who have the financial means necessary to consolidate and groom the image stream available to the public.