Communication Technology and New Media Commons^™

A Concise History Of The Fauxtography Blogstorm In The 2006 Lebanon War, Stephen D. Cooper

Communications Faculty Research

Whatever the other consequences of the kinetic war between Israel and Hezbollah in the summer of 2006, it gave rise to a neologism now commonplace in the blogosphere. In the blog lexicon, fauxtography refers to visual images, especially news photographs, which convey a questionable (or outright false) sense of the events they seem to depict.i Apart from the clever word play evident in the term, it is shorthand for a serious criticism of photojournalism products, both the images and the associated text. Since accuracy is a cardinal tenet of journalistic ethics, clearly stated in the ethics code of the Society …