Page:The Newspaper and the Historian.djvu/458



illustrations that the historian meets with, he must agree with a prominent newspaper when it says, “ The temptation to 'fake' pictures is considerably stronger than the temptation to 'fake' news itself, and it is yielded to with proportionately greater frequency by those papers that make the pretence that their pictorial chronicle is anything like as complete as their news

service." 58 The illustration has often been a convenient medium for influencing political policy . In time of peace the photograph may be so manipulated as to magnify the walls of snow that

line the streets of a city and thus the illustration may be used

to oust a street commissioner objectionable to the politicians in control, or it may reduce in height the piles of accumulated street refuse and thus help to keep in office an inefficient deputy

commissioner ; it may magnify and distort the cracks in the walls of a building and thus turn a building inspector out of office.

Political caricatures and cartoons have been most effective weapons in times of national and of international controversy ,

and the general rules for the cartoon “ have now been worked out in experience. One upon which nearly all are to -day agreed is that it must be predominantly good-natured. It may be widely distributed throughout Italy with a caption to indicate that they were pictures of citizens of Fiume voting in favor of annexation to Italy.' " -- The New Republic, May 10, 1919 , 19 : 33 ; New York Times, April 30 , 1919.

F. Avenarius evidently published Das Bild als Verleumder with the object

of showing the Germans and the neutral countries the misrepresentations in the illustrated papers of France, England, and Russia. The seventy -two illustrations included in it seem to sustain his contention that these mis representations were deliberate and not infrequent. But when he challenged friends or enemies of Germany to show him similar misrepresentations in German newspapers he might have expected the gauntlet to be picked up.

The answer to Das Bild als Verleumder was L'Imposture par l'Image. The book gave seventy -eight illustrations, - sixty -one collected from seventeen German papers and eleven from three Austrian papers, - showing that the

legend of pictures had been changed ; negatives had been retouched and “ improved ;" illustrations used many years before appeared with new names; illustrations of the defeat of the French in 1870 were made to serve for the war of 1914 ; signatures were erased ; names of places were exchanged ; a French attack was transformed into a retreat. - It seemed to be, in homely phrase, a case where the pot called the kettle black.

Charge and counter- charge are discussed by Dr. Lucien -Graux, " La fausse nouvelle et l'image,” Les fausses nouvelles de la grande guerre, II , 175 - 199.

58 New York Evening Post, February 17, 1908.