“The only feeling that anyone can have about an event he does not experience is the feeling aroused by his mental image of that event … For it is clear enough that under certain conditions men respond as powerfully to fictions as they do to realities.” Walter Lippmann, Public Opinion, 1922.
[Photo Credit: Aaron Tang/Wiki Commons]“Thorndike shot a sequence of 25 photos right after the blast that shows injured and stunned victims on the ground below. But it was the behavior of one man — seen running from the scene — that prompted Thorndike to contact the FBI.”
“His reflex is to sprint away that really caught my eye [sic]” Thorndike recalls. “Everyone else in the photo is stunned, shocked and frozen,” he said. “It’s either someone who is badly burned, panicked and running, or they’re running for another reason.”[5]
Thorndike’s photographs of what transpired at “ground zero” of the Boston Marathon bombing event contrast sharply with the widely-circulated video footage from the Boston Globe, where the videographer appears to purposely arch the camera away from alleged bombing victims and activity on the sidewalk.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xiXroQp8t4
Although more than 260 individuals supposedly suffered injuries as a result of the bombings,[6] the high resolution photographs of both Thorndike and Tang indicate no more than three-to-four dozen persons in the immediate vicinity of the initial explosion, most of whom remain mobile in the immediate aftermath and are soon eclipsed in number by law enforcement and medical responders.
According to the CBS Boston report, “Thorndike and his co-workers fled soon after the photos were taken.” This is perhaps an unusual observation since journalists given that within seconds of the detonations the Boston Police locked down surrounding buildings in order to strictly control media access to the unfolding event. [See, for example, video
here at 0:07-2:24].[7] CBS also curiously reports, “All the other bay windows in the office were blown out except the one where Thorndike stood.”[8]
http://memorygapdotorg.files.wordpre...8722.jpg?w=474
{Photo Credit: Benjamin Thorndike]
In terms of broadcast, with the exception of the more detailed interview highlighted above by CBS Boston, the novice photographer is given a soundbite on ABC and NBC newscasts, as the photos are presented and lightly touched upon.[9] For example, like Thorndike, NBC’s Pete Williams similarly references the man emerging from the center of the initial blast. “[Y]ou can see the impact of the blast has partially ripped his clothes away,” Williams remarks.[10]
Thorndike’s photos are also brought up twice on one specific CNN program by the cable channel’s “law enforcement analyst” Mike Brooks, who explains how the visual evidence from a typical crime investigation is handled. “What [federal law enforcement] have done,” Brooks remarks, is that they will take this picture, any video that is along that route, and they will try to put together a timeline. Going back before, during and after and what they’ll do is they’ll take this video, and they will send it to Quantico. The FBI lab at Quantico has an engineering section. I have used them on a number of my cases to help enhance video and the technology has increased so much, you know, over the years–”[11]
What the FBI in fact proceeded to do with the assistance of major media was almost the exact opposite–focusing on the Tsarnaevs to the exclusion of all other agents and phenomena–and foregrounding these images alongside those of purported evidence and the injured to forthrightly incriminate the Tsarnaevs. The overall effect of this gross manipulation was evident in the jubilation exhibited by Boston residents upon Tamarlan’s murder and Dzhokhar’s capture; mass ecstasy eerily akin to the effect of a public lynching.
Events such as momentous political assassinations, the Tonkin Gulf, Oklahoma City, and 9/11 have suggested that government-corporate manipulation of the public for broader political ends is not difficult to achieve. Control over an event and the select use of stimuli elicits certain desired responses. This is particularly the case in a society that exercises almost unquestioning allegiance toward what Erich Fromm termed “anonymous authority.” The Boston Marathon bombing event suggests the end result of this blind faith; how such finely tuned stagecraft can mobilize a mass mentality to the degree that it misinterprets the implementation of martial law as a genuine representation of a public will.
Notes:
[1] Bev Ford, Greg B. Smith, and Larry McShane, “Police Narrow in on Two Suspects in Boston Marathon Bombing,”
New York Daily News, April 17, 2013; Brian MacQuarrie, “Spectator’s Picture [sic] of Scene Draws Attention,”
Boston Globe, April 18, 2013; Katharinie Q. Steelye and Ian Lovett, “After Attack, Suspects Returned to Routines, Raising No Suspicions,”
New York Times, April 28, 2013.
[2] “Boston Terror Link to N-bomb at Olympics,”
Scottish Express, April 21, 2013; “Did Hamza [sic] Inspire Boston Bombers?”
Scottish Express, April 28, 2013.
[3] Sera Congi, “
Photographer Discusses Images of Boston Marathon Bombing Blast,” CBS WBZ TV Boston, April 17, 2013.
[4] “
After the Explosion: Moment by Moment,” CNN, April 17, 2013.
[4] Congi, “Photographer Discusses Images of Boston Marathon Bombing Blast.”
[5] Ibid.
[6] James F. Tracy, “
The Boston Marathon Bombing’s Inflated Injury Tallies,”
Global Research, May 11, 2013.
[7] PlasmaBurns, “
Heroes Are Scripted – Boston Lies,” YouTube, January 11, 2014.
[8] Congi, “Photographer Discusses Images of Boston Marathon Bombing Blast.”
[9] Brian Williams, Anne Thompson, et al., “NBC News for April 16, 2013,” NBC; “Images of Bomb and Torn Backpack, Pressure Cooker with Ball Bearings,” ABC News Transcript, April 17, 2013; Anderson Cooper, Tom Fuentes, et al., “Reports On Bombing Arrest; Justice Department: No Arrest Made,” CNN, April 17, 2013; Mark Lauer, Savannah Guthrie, et al., “NBC News for April 17, 2013.”
[10] Lauer, Guthrie, et al., “NBC News for April 17, 2013.”
[11] Cooper, Fuentes, et al., “Reports On Bombing Arrest; Justice Department: No Arrest Made,” CNN, April 17, 2013.