Inception- "Your mind is the scene of the crime"

I saw the movie Inception twice last week. It had it all- an excellent storyline, great special effects and cinemotography, superb acting, and a quality original soundtrack. If you haven't seen it yet, Inception presents a world in which your enemies can break into your dreams and steal ideas from (or maybe even plant ideas into) your subconscious. The theme central to the movie is Perception and Reality, as the main character, Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio), struggles with distringuishing between the dream world in the real world.

It just so happens that the issue of perception and reality is just as relevant to many current events. The media can plant ideas into your mind more easily than Cobb and his team can. Magazines and news shows have been slyly photoshopping images since the term was invented, and biased news crews have been taking quotes out of context even before then.

Earlier this summer, The Economist was criticized for photoshopping a photo of Obama to make it look more emotionally appealing for its cover story "Obama v BP: The damage beyond the spill." A local parishoner, Charlotte Randolph, was edited out of the photo. After The New York Times exposed the photoshopping, deputy editor of The Economist responded by saying "We removed her not to make a political point, but because the presence of an unknown woman would have been puzzling to readers [. . . ] it is to bring out the central character. We don’t edit photos in order to mislead." Honestly, I don't feel like The Economist was trying to misinform its readers, but the image without Mrs. Randolph has a different emotional appeal to anyone that sees it. The cover (including the text) infers that Obama was damaged by the oil spill, especially in light of the edit, yet the editor claims that "I wanted readers to focus on Mr. Obama, not because I wanted to make him look isolated [. . . ] "The damage beyond the spill” referred to on the cover, and examined in the cover leader, was the damage not to Mr. Obama, but to business in America." However, I didn't percieve that message when I got my Economist in the mail and saw the cover.

More controversially, AMERICABlog has analyzed three photos from BP's crisis response and found that they have photoshopped screens into them to make it look like the employees were busier than they actually were.  AMERICABlog has circled the areas where the edits are visible in one of the images (for more details click the link above), which are featured on BP's website. The Washington Post recently picked up the story, and now BP is scrambling to defend itself... yet again.

However, more than just the media doctor images. When the Chinese government built a railway in an area that environmentalists claimed would endanger local antelope, it photoshopped antelope into photos of the completed railway. Two summers ago during the Summer Olympics, China broadcasted a computer-generated clip of a complicated fireworks routine during its live footage of the fireworks in the opening ceremony. While the second of these two stories is more innocent, both are two examples of the government of China intentionally attempting to deceive its people. While China gets political capital out of such instances, there are businesses out there that make big bucks on photo-editing. Take Digital Retouch, an entire company based on retouching, shaping, and manipulating photos of models (the Beauty & Hair and Shaping sections are the most dramatic, see for yourself).

Still, photoshopping is only one way to plant false ideas into a media consumer's mind. You may be tired of hearing about this by now, but it's an easily identifiable and recent example of news networks taking a quote directly out of context. What happened was Andrew Breitbart, a conservative blogger, posted a segment of 4-month old video of USDA employee Shirley Sherrod speaking at a Georgia NAACP gathering. Sherrod's father was murdered by a racist, and in her speech Sherrod talked about overcoming her racism to help a poor white farmer. However, the quote about her racist past was taken out of context and exploded over conservative media. Before anyone thought to review the entire speech, Sherrod was fired from her job in the Department of Agriculture, and the President of the NAACP even condemned her speech. It wasn't until someone thought to actually review the entire video that Sherrod was vindicated. Although some complain that this received too much news coverage, I believe it's a clear example of bias in the media. Think of the consequences for Sherrod and race relations as a whole if no one had though to check up on Breitbart's original claim.

The tagline for Inception is "Your mind is the scene of the crime." In this modern day, the criminals are everyone from respectable periodicals like the Economist to corporations like BP to governments like China to mega news networks like Fox News. Thankfully, other journalists and bloggers have called them out on their crimes against the honest mind. However, it's scary to think of the misinformation that hasn't been uncovered. At least Cobb is stuck in the dream world of Inception so he can't plant anymore false ideas into people's minds.