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Disaster Focus Photo January 22, 2010

Why and How I Lost It Yesterday (Over CNN "Getting Off" On a Haitian Victim Rescue)

I confess. I lost it yesterday. If you saw my post (Please Stop, Anderson. Just STOP), I appealed for readers to contact CNN and use the Twitterverse to complain about Anderson Cooper's visual exploitation of the Haitian people. Because many of you wrote for more explanation, let me explain what...

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Disaster Focus Photo January 21, 2010

Please Stop, Anderson. Just STOP.

This is a message to Anderson Cooper and CNN... As American citizens concerned about the humanity of the Haitian people, the sensationalist and self-promoting tendencies of American media and the power of pictures, we urge you to: Please stop using the camera to rob people of their dignity when...

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Obama at One Year

Having watched Obama closely, what I see in the picture is a man whose every action is ultimately governed by one factor, which is: whether he'll be able to get up the next day and still look himself in the eye.

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Culture Focus Photo January 20, 2010

Beyond Burning Bodies, High-Impact Mobilization and Those Haitians Down There

On the surface, this doesn't seem to have much to do with Haiti. Nothing is collapsed or broken, and there is no blood, no open wounds or stumps instead of hands or feet, no burning bodies. But then you read the caption: "Alex Alexis collapsed when he learned that...

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The Flogging

Tareq Salahi and his wife Michaele. The high priest and priestess of "look at me."

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Campaign '10 Photo January 19, 2010

What Was 60

After the Coakley blow out and a party fretting all night on cable news about circular firing squads, wither the Democrats?

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Campaign '10 Photo

Scott Brown: The End of the End

Out of all the photos of Ted Kennedy's memorial service and funeral, this marked the end of the end. Or so one thought, until tonight's election for his Senate seat.

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Playing the Palace

  I would love to know how the US military thought this picture/photo-op would play (in Haiti -- after the rush; domestically; abroad) in landing American troops at the Haitian Presidential Palace and claiming use of the place.

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Your Turn: Haiti, On a Not-Insubstantial Level, A Show

For days now, we have been flooded by absolutely horrific, increasingly grizzly and often factually fragmentary images pouring out of Haiti and distributed not just via broadcast, but faster and more widely than ever before, through the proliferating and voraciously "page view" hungry on-line media.

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Campaign '10 Photo January 18, 2010

Brown/Clavin vs. Coakley/Obama (Or: Where Everybody Knows Your Name)

I was interested in the Brown campaign's PR strategy on Sunday to counter-program Obama, John Kerry and Victoria Reggie Kennedy's appearance with Coakley. Perhaps the most clever slice of local populism came in the person of John Ratzenberger. Just to look at "Cliff" is to think of him as...

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Photo

Little Haiti

One of the marvelous things about following the ebb-and-flow of visual politics each day is to witness how separate events come together to create their own meanings. NewsOne offers this simple snapshot this morning, capturing a smiling woman and a boy as they come across a mural of Martin...

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That "Looting" — Revisited

By the time they got to the reporter he had determined that what he thought might be violence breaking out because all the food was gone - was in reality children who had discovered a field full of empty boxes and had started an impromptu game of throwing them...

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Disaster Focus Photo January 17, 2010

Haiti: The Great U.S. War Machine

What if President Obama went on TV tomorrow and announced that the entire 70,000 person U.S. military mission in Afghanistan was going 100% humanitarian?

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Campaign '10 Photo

Real Men for Brown

It feels like a gender (manly-man) and class (hard hat) bias is playing through the Brown - Coakley contest in Massachusetts.

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If You're As Tired As I Am From Watching

If You're As Tired As I Am From Watching reports harping over-and-over (to the consternation of the locals) about how violence must just be right around the corner, this U.N. video is a necessary infusion of reality.

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Disaster Focus Photo January 16, 2010

Your Turn: Bush Clinton Obama Haiti

Can Bush really help, or his public involvement mostly symbolic, and even a face-saving gesture?

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Disaster Focus Photo January 15, 2010

That "Looting"

I think media has got to be very careful in using the term "looting" in the midst of Haiti's overwhelming humanitarian crisis, especially given how much that term calls to mind generations of violent protests and riots over civil rights.

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The Rescuers

In the faces of these Haitian rescue workers having just saved a baby on Thursday, all I can see -- besides tremendous sadness and obvious exhaustion under excruciating and increasingly desperate circumstances -- is exceptional character.

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