The controversy over the short video shared widely of Kentucky Catholic high-school students visiting Washington, D.C for the March for Life and appearing to mock American Indians and the subsequent other images of the same event that cast doubt that the students were to blame for the confrontation shows how film footage constructs rather than reflects the truths of a given moment, Ian Bogust wrote in The Atlantic.
In an opinion article on the debate over the videos of the incident, Bogust wrote that the notion is not only wrong that “cameras depict the world as it really is,” but it’s also “bringing forth just as much animosity as the polarization that is thought to produce the conflicts cameras record.”
In the case of the encounter at the Lincoln Memorial, he insisted that “neither the original video nor the new one explains what ‘really happened.’ Instead, both offer raw material that can take on various meanings in different contexts.”
Bogust further maintained that which party is telling the truth matters only marginally, because “the image and the clip take on a life of their own, reproducing a conflict that viewers have already been primed to seek out by the overall political situation and their place in it.”
The author insisted that his “point is not to apologize for the students’ behavior, or even to explain it, but to underscore how a slightly different video might have convinced the very same viewers who censured the Covington Catholic students to reach exactly the opposite conclusion.”
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