Product Description

* (in which the author explains why he no longer reads)

Bestselling author David Shields analyzed over a decades worth of front-page war photographs from and came to a shocking conclusion: the photo-editing process ofthe paper of record,by way of pretty, heroic, and lavishly aesthetic image selection, pullsthe woolover the eyes of its readers; Shields forces us to face not only the the media's complicity in dubious and catastrophic military campaigns but our own as well.This powerful media mouthpiece, the mighty, far from being a check on governmental power, is in reality a massive amplifier for its dark forces by virtue of the way it aestheticizeswarfare. Anyone baffled by the willful American involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan cant help but see in this book how eagerly and invariably theled the way in making the case for these wars through the manipulation of its visuals. Shields forces the reader to weigh the consequences of our own passivity in the face of these images opiatic numbing. The photographs gathered in, often beautiful and always artful, are filters of reality rather than the documentary journalism they purport to be.