Media critics often say that visual images trump words. The claim makes some sense: Pictures have major impacts on how we see the world. And we’re apt to pay less attention to photo captions or the voice-overs that accompany news footage on TV screens.

     But when images meet the eye, our reactions depend on our sense of context. The same news outlets that select certain photos and video snippets also influence how we look at what we see. The pictures can have political clout because of prevalent assumptions and attitudes largely shaped by media.

     Many people reacted strongly to President Bush’s “top gun” imitation when he jetted onto an aircraft carrier near San Diego a couple of months ago. Bush fans and pliable journalists swooned. More skeptical observers noticed the shameless manipulation. But everyone was looking at identical images. The determining factor was not the choreography of the photo-op but the outlooks of those who watched.

     Let’s say a magazine photograph, taken in a war zone, shows a mother holding a baby covered with blood. Two people -- looking at the

CPT team members Peggy Gish, Maureen Jack and Anne Montgomery travelled an   hour north of Baghdad on the road to Tikrit to visit the uncle of a friend of the team who had recently been imprisoned.  

At 6.00 am one morning he, his wife and five young children were awakened from sleep by a megaphone. Their house was surrounded by a number of army   vehicles and two helicopters.  The soldiers said that they were looking   for a senior member of Saddam's regime, who they had been told was hiding   there.  The children saw them as they pointed their weapons; they were   frightened and crying.  The soldiers found and removed a significant sum   of money.  They handcuffed the owner of the house and two memb! ers of his   extended family.  They said that they would hold them for an hour and then   release them; about a kilometer along the road they freed the other two,   but they took the owner of the house to prison and held him there for   twelve days.

In prison there were 80 men in the same room; they had blankets but no   beds.  There were two outside toilets, which seemed to be open, without

The corporate Democrats who greased Bill Clinton's path to the White House are now a bit worried. Their influence on the party's presidential nomination process has slipped. But the Democratic Leadership Council can count on plenty of assistance from mainstream news media.

For several years leading up to 1992, the DLC curried favor with high-profile political journalists as they repeated the mantra that the Democratic Party needed to be centrist. Co-founded by Clinton in the mid-1980s, the DLC emphasized catering to "middle class" Americans -- while the organization filled its coffers with funding from such non-middle-class bastions as the top echelons of corporate outfits like Arco, Prudential-Bache, Dow Chemical, Georgia Pacific and Martin Marietta.

In a 1992 book, "Who Will Tell the People," political analyst William Greider noted that the Democratic Leadership Council's main objective was "an attack on the Democratic Party's core constituencies -- labor, schoolteachers, women's rights groups, peace and disarmament activists, the racial minorities and supporters of

            They're saving the world from hunger again. This time, the bold crusaders have been mustered in Sacramento, Calif., to proclaim the glories of chemical-industrial agriculture, biotech, genetically modified crops and livestock, and kindred expressions of the modern age. The forum has been a federally sponsored Ministerial Conference and Expo of Agricultural Science and Technology. Under the approving eyes of bigwigs from firms like Monsanto, U.S. officials like Agriculture Secretary Helen Veneman pounded the drum for high-tech agriculture.

            Said Veneman last Monday, "This conference is for those most in need. It (hunger) has to become a global agenda ... new approaches are needed."

            Was there ever a moment, in the long tradition of such overblown rhetoric, that "new approaches" weren't needed? Scour through all the old speeches across the past century about starving billions around the planet or starving millions right here in the USA, and it's always the same professions of noble purpose. "We can end hunger now," declared the sales folk for the Green Revolution that peaked in expectation in 1971 when Dr.