MONDAY'S LETTERS: Your Choices for 'Best Comic Ever,' David Perlmutter's 'Crisis in Photojournalism'

By: E&P Staff In today's letters, readers chime in with their thoughts on what was the best comic strip ever, and some thoughts about David Perlmutter's essay on the "crisis in photojournalism."


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Votes for the 'Best Comic Ever'?


["Pickles"] is cleanly and nicely drawn, the characters are endearing and I can "hear" that old curmudgeon Earl's voice in the dialogue. It is usually good for an actual smile or chuckle and I do respect that, with all the ridiculous, dead-in-the-60's strips that still run freely, boringly in my paper. All that said, none compare to Lynn's art, Lynn's writing, Lynn's characters and our feeling part of the Patterson family.

She is a ground breaking, by introducing racial diversity, disability and sexual orientation into her strip in such a seamless fashion. It's never IN YOUR FACE. It is, as in real life, just there. When I first heard of her disease, as a cartoonist and illustrator myself, I was devastated for her. An artist who may someday not be able to draw? Then I realized, Lynn is much more then a cartoonist, she has new challenges, interests, causes enough to occupy her every moment, she has her family and her friends, she does not, I believe, define herself by her cartooning as most cartoonists do. I think she has been a champion to many, many people who have not had a voice in the comics before.

Christine Tripp



I think it is near impossible to pick a "best" comic strip of all time, because very few long running strips are consistently good. Look at "Beetle Bailey" and "Garfield" -- both have ceased to be funny or poignant years ago, and near the end of their runs, both "Nancy" and the venerable "Peanuts" were pathetic. "For Better or Worse" is a great comic, but I think "Funky Winkerbean" is just as funny and relevant. I loved Calvin, but after my son was born in 1992 it produced to much of a sense of deja vu. I would like to cast my vote for best comic for Daniel Pinkwater's short lived strip "Norb." I admit I hated it at first, but it grew on me. I missed it when it was gone. What other comic strip would send you to the dictionary every edition?

Jim Rendt



My only disagreement with you would be ranking "For Better" over "Doonesbury." "Doonesbury" has done most everything that "For Better" has done in terms of character development, plus raised important political and cultural questions. But, I give "For Better or For Worse" credit for doing a great job covering an important and overlooked story -- the family. It's almost a tie for number one.

And, you should mention that "Pickles" is very funny in a quiet way, day in and day out, that is more sophisticated than may be generally appreciated.

Charles Batchelor



Definitely "Bloom County" -- followed by "Outland" and now the Sunday-only "Opus."

Andrew Griffin
Lawton, Okla.



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On the 'Crisis in Photojournalism'

[David Perlmutter is] either naive, or a better liar than I've met in a long time.

While this may be a "golden age" of photojournalism ethics in your universe, where I live there is more and more evidence that all branches of the news media (so-called) will lie with abandon to get their way in the political sphere. When "fake but accurate" is defended by one of the largest outlets of Big Media, can fake and inaccurate be far behind?

Journalists are liberal. Journalism itself is biased as a result. How often do stories in the New York Times or on ABC paint a positive picture of gun owners? How many stories in the New York Times or on ABC paint a positive picture of Israel? How often is Hezbullah identified as a terrorist organization? How often are "studies" cited by organizations on the left reviewed to see if they are accurate or lies dressed up like statistics? The answer to all of these questions is, "Almost never." Journalists are Leftists -- some are quite obviously socialists or even communists. The stories they write reflect their personal views. Photojournalism is just another branch of the same stinking problem. ...

Debra Blatnik



Readers have long been writing the media and complaining about biased reporting. The media has been programmatic in it's responses. Reporting is depicted as "is factual," "is what are in the reporter's notes," etc.

The editors all miss the point. Their professionally written and polished arguments satisfy no one and are losers in and of themselves. Here's why. Whenever a customer tells you that your credibility is not all that it should be, you are on the losing side, and no argument can change that. Only performance can do that.

One thing about letters. They are often about subjective points. Opinions. Points of view.

Photographs are different though. Anyone can see what is there even if they don't grasp the veracity of what they see. Now we can argue about what is there in front of us all. It was easy to prove that so many photos were edited, that some people were playing a cast of characters for the world to misinterpret. Looking back at it, it was so obvious. Are the Hezbollah propagandists so unskilled that their best was really bad? Did they simply believe that whatever they made available, it would be published without question? Did they simply believe that we are not capable of discerning such poor frauds? Or did they simply believe that we are too stupid to see what is right before us? I think that more than one answer is correct here because the voices we have shown them and the world have been so thoughtless. ...

Joe Dantone
Austin, Texas



I am a professional librarian and I was fact checking long before anyone heard of bloggers. For years I had people come into the library and say that something in the news didn?t sound right to them. We would look it up and find out that the customer was right and some news organization was grossly misinforming the public. I had reached the point where I no longer believed the New York Times, ABC, or Time just about the time Blogging became popular.

I do not expect any improvement until traditional media dies off because traditional media will close ranks. Just like the police in New York you can expect a ?blue wall of silence?. Our media has become a monolith driven by groupthink. It is an end stage school a la Kuhn. Either Journalists face the fact that they are no longer gatekeepers or else fade into insignificance. I?m betting on you guys fading away. I mean, big media kept getting it wrong and kept getting caught slanting it and all they did was obscure the correction on A23. I?ve already moved on to sources I see as more reliable. But then, as a Librarian, my job is to examine information sources for their scope, accuracy, and coverage.

Robert Finch



... The time to address [the crisis] is now, before photojournalism is thoroughly discredited. I address the main problem of veracity of photographs and what a photojournalist or media response to that should be, here. Some have refered to this as a proposed 'code of ethics for photojournalism', missing the point that it is a constructive method to use cheap digital storage to show the veracity of photographs and their context for a single event. Events that have been staged or have evidence of broader manipulation needs an investigatory board to review such work that is independent, respected and uses the capabilities beyond that of editors and photographers to piece together what has happened at events. This is using contextual analysis of photographs and motion imagery, combined with other media sources so that placement of events and individuals in both geospatial reference and temporal reference can be established. Today when events are *staged* as historical recreations they are actually labeled as such on television: witness any of the 'true crime' shows and you will see this clearly and unmistakeably so that viewers know this is *not* the real thing. While times were more lax during World War II, Korea, Vietnam and other conflicts, the movement from staging of recreations to wholly fabricated events for footage now places the entire reporting effort of the media at doubt.

In previous times newspapermen liked to say that they gave us "the first cut of history," with pride. Now we have the ability to put all that wound up on the "cutting room floor of that first take" into archival storage and retrieval systems so that the actual historical information can be made available to the public. A "first cut" becomes mere "commentary" when it is reported without context, and biased and slanted commentary at that. By having all news organizations and journalists covering historical events with actual images make those available, these primary historical reference documents can be put into wider context and help give a flow of history beyond the "first cut" which may be counterfactual or just biased.

The time for this was *yesterday*. All of the media will be hard pressed in the next decade as the capacity to make fully photorealistic 3D models and animations move out of the realm of hollywood studios and onto the private desktop. That has been a major concern of the graphic arts community for at least as long and is the recognition of where these tools are headed. Poor photomanipulation is not caught because it was ahistorical, but because it was poor artwork. This then brings up the question of: How many GOOD artists have been passing off their artwork as historical fact, and for how long? ...

Kurt Hoglund



Your presumption is that these frauds occur because of the need for drama, or because of pressure to life and limb, or at least further access.

That doesn't seem to be the case. Photos of dead Israelis would be as dramatic, but we don't see them very much, nor are they staged for the benefit of the reporters, nor do enterprising photogs use Photoshop to fake them.

When a series of Katyushas is seen heading off for Israel, and a caption is inserted that these are Israeli missile strikes, we have something else than overzealousness and an itch for the money shot.

What we have is clear evidence the newsgatherers have taken sides and are lying to help their boys.

It was one thing to argue about media bias. It is clear, but not tangible, and you can't find a smoking gun, or anything else which can't be dismissed by a simple refusal. This is the real deal. These guys are lying, and they are lying in ways that benefit one side and not the other.

Okay? They lie, and although we knew they lied, it could not be tangibly proved. Now it is.

This is way bigger than screwing with a few photos. It means journalism has been shown to be what has been true for many years. It is corrupt. It opposes the U.S. efforts. ...

Unfortunately, the problem isn't about photojournalism. The problem is that photojournalism was the key to prove what most of us already knew. Photojournalism, from here on, is peanuts.

Richard Aubrey



You don't have a monopoly on the news anymore. There is a whole alternative media out there watching what you do and offering other sources of news and commentary. The days of three newspapers, three networks, and three weekly news magazines all reporting the same news from the same point of view are over. I don't think the coverage is any poorer or more biased than it ever was, I think what's happening is the biases are being pointed out daily.

When Rush Limbaugh started referring to "drive by reporting," I thought it was a clever bit of satire that encapsulated the problem with today's Mainstream Media. The MSM is populated by out-of-touch elitists who fancy themselves as a co-equal branch of government. They want to make policy, not report the news. Back in the days of "Uncle Walter" they used to get away with it. In the day of Blogs, Fox and Rush, they get called to task.

Chas Thomas



Might it be possible for digital camera makers to invent special "professional photojournalist digital cameras" (I'll call it) which produce an encrypted data file of the original, in addition to one which the photographer can touch-up, and then both the original and the touched-up version (if any) would need to be sent to the newswire? Only the news editor would have the key for unlocking the encrypted version, and he also would have software which would instantly reveal the changes which were made.

While that wouldn't have any effect on the other problems encountered in Lebanon, at least that might give the world some semblance of a digital 'negative' (presuming that whoever has the encryption key doesn't modify it).

D. Hansen