Digital media:

Let us then end this elucidation of problems by saying that the manipulation of imagery in digital form has intensified (but not created) the enormous skepticism as to whether anything that looks out of the ordinary wasn’t manipulated - from OJ Simpson wearing (or not wearing) Bruno Magli shoes to pictures of “wild” animals that might have been photographed in a zoo and placed in front of stripped-in backgrounds. This skepticism is both deadly and helpful, because it is one place to stand to begin to unravel a variety of problems, many of them having little to do with computers.

But as one of the founders of the French humanitarian group, “Medecins sans frontieres” (Doctors Without Borders), put it: “Without a photograph there is no massacre.” They have not been able to prove that massacres occurred when only relying upon eyewitness accounts but have needed photographs to be believed. The convenient solution offered by non-credible photography is that there will be no more massacres because no one will have to believe that they happened; the cocoon in which the affluent segments of the world lives will be drawn that much tighter.