Sarah Harte: Fake news has become an enemy of the truth in our tech-led society

Many images and videos circulated since the war began have been fake.

A video that purported to be the Israelis bombing a Palestinian mosque was nine-year-old footage from the war in Syria.

A video showing dead Palestinians in body bags on the streets of Gaza was taken during a pro-Palestine demonstration in Washington DC with the display symbolising Palestinians who died in Israeli attacks on Gaza.

A TikTok video that went viral supposedly showing a Hamas terrorist making fun of a kidnapped Jewish toddler following the attack on Israel predated the conflict by a month, and the identity of the man and child remains unclear.

An account claiming to be the Israeli National Intelligence Agency, Mossad, bearing its emblem, fooled many people including some journalists and is spreading disinformation. 

For example, a clip shared on its X account supposedly from the war was an excerpt from a video game

In a tech-led society, fake news has become the enemy of truth. Artificial Intelligence with its ability to generate photographs and videos that appear real has only complicated the situation. 

In the context of the Israel-Hamas war, when groupthink means we reinforce each other’s convictions that we are right, we are more prone to accepting anything that matches our personal narrative, even when it is false.

Sites exist where we can fact-check the integrity of images, videos, and stories, some of which are listed at the end of the article, but this can be another chore when we are busy. 

An easier solution is to seek credible news sources from media outlets that employ journalists to produce fact-based news, who sift authentic information from false claims.

You’ll still get bias. News outlets take lines on issues, and journalists can shape the narrative of events they cover and construct stories that support their point of view. 

They are human after all. But what they produce is far more likely to be a reasonably fair and accurate representation of what they have investigated rather than entirely fabricated dross floating around online.

Watching the bombs rain down on Gaza, seeing the bleeding, weeping children then viewing the hollowed-out faces of grief-stricken Israelis clutching pictures of their loved ones kidnapped by Hamas and still held hostage, I was reminded this week of Magnum, the world-famous photographic agency and in particular, of a certain set of war photos.

Magnum is still going, but in its heyday, it garnered a reputation for high-quality photojournalism. 

The kind of journalism that was once well funded where photojournalists were handsomely paid to embark on large-scale, longer-term projects and what they produced endured and shaped how we saw the world.

Robert Capa’s iconic pictures were taken on D-Day, June 6, 1944, as he landed with the Allies at Colleville sur Mer in Normandy, codenamed Omaha Beach. 

In taking these pictures Capa put his life on the line. He was one of four co-founders of Magnum along with Henri Cartier-Bresson, George Rodger, and David Seymour and a world-famous war photographer.

Capa’s black-and-white images are surprisingly modern-looking. There was no television at the time, so the images on the cover of the iconic Life magazine gave people a sense of how things looked. (They can be viewed online or bought as prints from Magnum although they are pricey.) 

They depict terrified young men in the cold Normandy water amongst the debris as roughly 34,000 men crawl toward shore under heavy German machine gun fire.

A standout picture that became the defining image of the landing is the head of a young American GI as he approaches the shore. 

We see a desperate, frightened young soldier, perhaps on the verge of death, somebody’s son, and now utterly alone

This image humanises the invasion and lays bare what is at stake in war. To my mind, it also deconstructs the myths that warmongers, invariably male, feed us about male courage and valour during times of war. 

The machoism that accompanies romanticised notions of defending one’s homeland and fighting for a set of values as part of a tribe that defends the in-group is debunked.

An interesting aside about Capa is that he took hundreds of photos of Israel between 1948 and 1950 with one commentator remarking: “Visually speaking, Robert Capa made Israel.”

Palestinians were erased from Capa’s photos, and he was accused of acting as an unofficial propagandist for a country he depicted as full of idealised Israeli settlers.

His personal biography explains this. He was born in Hungary in 1913 when antisemitism was widespread and later exiled to Berlin, where he saw Hitler come to power before he fled.

 Many of his relatives perished at Auschwitz. Small wonder then, that his work was framed through a particular ideological framework and that despite his immense talent he crossed the line from observer to narrator.

To return to his D-Day images perhaps the biggest takeaway is that men are not monochromatic actors in war but human beings, with backstories and families waiting for them at home. 

As we question what we are seeing in the Middle East, we can remember that as we go at each other’s throats with our different perspectives.

When fanatics on either side of the Israeli-Hamas conflict, commit brutal acts in an endless ultimately meaningless cycle of violence where the language used is dismantling, disarming, defeating, and destroying the enemy — and sectarianism abounds — there’s a huge value in images that remind us of our common humanity. 

We need them to ground us, to provide nuance, to be the opposite of reactive coverage that fuels our hate and divisions in this sulphurous atmosphere. 

More than ever, we need good journalism to haul us back from the brink

According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, between October 7 and yesterday, 40 journalists and media workers have so far been killed during the Israel-Hamas war: 35 Palestinian, four Israeli, and one Lebanese. 

These journalists have lost their lives to capture the story and we owe them. Ta said imithe ar shli na firinne.