I don’t understand how any of those points would help at all. Number 1 is irrelevant and number 2 is easily handled.
“Oh, neighbor didn’r hear a gunshot? Well let’s put down the guns and knock on the door nicely instead”. Come on now.
> "Well let’s put down the guns and knock on the door nicely instead”
And why not? In the same situation in Europe, this is what would happen. Regular cops would confirm the situation first. And it works. Units similar to the SWAT do exist, but I've never heard of them being dispatched directly after an anymous call.
"if all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail...", and well, the SWAT is pretty much a hammer in this kind of situation.
If the call goes on for 20 minutes in great details on an ongoing hostage situation with already multiple casualties, I certainly expect the European SWAT to show up as soon as possible.
I'd personally be shocked if it were any difficult to get a hold of the GIGN, the RAID, the DGSE, the GCHQ or the UK SWAT when necessary.
>Here, Swedes believe that Trump is such a catastrophe, and wonder why Americans could vote for him. We should instead look at our own pathetic "feminist" government, and ask ourselves how and why we got here.
Swede here. I don't even know how many times I've thought and said these exact words. Spot on.
To be fair, this is probably the only time I've seen the term hacked used correctly. I no longer know whether I should use it in this sense or the "incorrect but used by almost everyone" sense.
I don't think it's used correctly here. They didn't hack together any code, they didn't hack on some multipart kludge. All they did was break rules by buying votes.
Photography is a tough job. It's wracked with internal politics, people playing favourites and in general just a lot of work. Honestly, it's easier to get $250k in VC funding than to sell your first break out photo essay (even if it's brilliant). I'm not an actor, nor a novelist, but I imagine it's a lot like trying to get your first big role or your novel to even get read by an editor. It's a painful grind on a day to day endless cycle of rejection.
Let's not even start with the fact that news staff jobs are basically non-existent, so most of these photographers are going into war zones with no backup support, no insurance provided for them, and it's all done on spec, so it's literally laying their life on the line with, if you're lucky, $3k for two weeks worth of getting shot it. We could then get into the mental health aspect of working for very little, very hard, while also facing the very real prospect of death every day (remember, probably no insurance for therapy or zoloft back stateside).
This is just for war photographers. For your day-to-day working photojournalist it's actually worse for pay and you have to be on call 24/7 or else they'll move on to the next guy/girl and you're out of rotation. Good luck going on holiday.
I am a photo editor at a major publication that's been around for more than 100 years, and I have been responsible for sending photographers to Iraq, Syria and other conflict zones over the past seven years.
The short answer is that we do not publish unsolicited imagery from war zones, especially imagery from a completely unknown photographer randomly approaching us via email. In the same way we wouldn't publish a quote from a random citizen claiming to have interviewed Donald Trump, we do due diligence to learn the context of unsolicited images.
Lots of people make the assumption that images are unbiased and truthful representations of an objective reality, and I see many comments here supporting Kai for his "distinct" perspective. I encourage you to read Errol Morris' book "Believing is Seeing", where he discusses the importance of context as related to truth in photography.
Furthermore, especially in a conflict like Iraq or Syria, we do not want to encourage random photo cowboys to show up without the resources that our organizations offer true professionals on assignment in these stories. As journalism got particularly crunched in the early 2000s, we tried this for a brief period and it resulted in many young photographers heading to war zone s to "make a name" for themselves. They were killed and we were blamed for encouraging them.
Lastly, my professional opinion is that Kai's work is amateur. It's what we see from young photographers, relying way too much on aesthetic and situation to try and make an abstract point. Study the work of James Nachtwey, the late Chris Hondros, Don McCullin, even Robert Capa, and you will immediately see (and more importantly, FEEL) the difference.
I am happy to share more if there is interest in starting a dialogue.
Tell that to the BBC, ITV, and Sky News here in the UK. They show dead bodies all the time. I find it distasteful. I get it - people died, you don't have to show me their bodies to get your point across.
A media's distaste for violent images is not the issue here. Photographs very similar to these are published every day by tens of thousands of outlets around the world. The issue is that these photographs are coming from an unknown source and not many editors are apt to trust unknown sources randomly emailing with conflict images these days.
Source: I hire and direct photographers in war zones professionally.
Lots of supply and little demand - doing photography is one thing but selling photography is one tough job.
Journalistic photography is slowly moving away from being a profession towards an expensive hobby where you may sell some pictures sometimes, but not enough to earn a living or even cover the hardware.
I'd guess that there is fatigue or disinterest in the West at continuing to hear/see this sort of story. It doesn't sell so editors run with whatever local non-drama captivates people.
At least it looks like this ploy by the photographer has worked - search his name and loads of online media have published something similar to this link. The idea that people don't care and the media won't pay has made it a story. Good on him for outside the box thinking.
Perhaps these photos do not 'fit the current narrative' or go against the editorial policy of the news outlets.
Ownership of traditional mainstream media is cloistered in few hands and those hands have agendas for editorial policy and friends in high places.
Chomsky's Manufacturing consent well demonstrates how this is achieved bottom up: i.e. one isn't so much told what to think but hired because of ones views and worldview.
The correspondence of Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent and the practice of "culture-fit" in Hiring Practices should be a note of caution to growing companies.
Over constraining your hiring, ( i.e. the aspect of "culture-fit" that is antonymical to diversity ) can lead an organisation to blindness to the true state of things ( i.e. not having diverse perspectives on customers due to a lack of diversity in employee backgrounds ).
This is why diversity is not just about fairness but also highly pragmatic.
Diversity makes for wiser corporations which makes them anti-fragile and gives them new edges in competition.
It is also why the subtle method of subverting democracy outlined in Chomsky's Manufacturing Consent as a practice to create an organisation ( or newspaper ) that outputs a world view concurrent with ones own makes for fragile democracies and administrations.
That it can happen "unconsciously" because it is easier to recognise competence in those who are like you means organisations and democracies must be vigilant against entrenched political and journalistic class evolving.
In short: critics are better friends than an echo chamber.
Or contemporaneously: firing scientists does make climate change less true.
Or there is an active interest in resisting on-the-ground journalism about this conflict. Photos of soldiers killed or wounded are still subject to restriction.
