viz.

Screenshot of FoxNews.com via Salon

After the stunning news that Navy SEALs killed Osama bin Laden, the news outlets are scrambling for different things to say about the event and its coverage. One meme that has begun cropping up fits with the existing narrative about the Republican bias of Fox News. For instance, Salon displayed the screenshot of the Fox website under the headline, "Fox News congratulates Bush for bin Laden".

Natasha Lennard notes that the Fox site featured an image of President Bush, but none of Obama. While I think the images in this screenshot don't go quite as far as Lennard claims, they certainly demonstrate the importance of visual rhetoric and a careful attention to what images an individual or organization chooses to foreground. We could easily call this screenshot a visual gaffe.

Indeed, sites across the Internet are constructing a narrative about Fox News that implies not only conservative bias, but a subconscious equation of Obama with Osama. A typo in the news scroll for a local Fox affiliate is receiving the most attention:

Image via The Huffington Post

Holding up Fox for ridicule while imputing a conscious (or perhaps subconscious) maliciousness to the mistake, a HuffPo writer snarkily remarks, "You know, we had almost forgotten how similar the names of our commander-in-chief and our #1 enemy happen to be. Thank you, Fox, for providing us with this helpful reminder!" An update to the original post links to another gaffe, this time verbal rather than visual. There's even a video on YouTube in which Fox reporter Geraldo Rivera claims "Obama is dead" before correcting himself. 

The narrative these images allow Salon and HuffPo to advance is that not only is Fox News a biased media outlet promoting conservative views, but also that hatred of Obama runs so deeply there that it comes out as Freudian slips and subtle choices about page layout. Of course, while several of these mistakes appear on local affiliates, not the cable network channel, the fact that Fox News has provided a place for discussions such as the one featured below make such narratives easily believable to many people:

Image via BuzzFeed

One blogger, for example, calls Fox News a "horrible disgrace" based, it seems, entirely upon the Fox 40 mistaken news ticker. Fox 40, for its part, provided more a rebuttal than an apology in which it noted the ease with which typos can crop up while substantiating its claims with screenshots from 2 different ABC sites: 

Screenshots via Fox40.com

Since, however, there's no existing narrative about ABC's bias, I suspect we won't see their mistakes or those from any other networks making the rounds nearly as regularly as the Fox News gaffes (except on Failblog).

What I find particularly interesting about these intepretations is that they show visual analysis "in the wild" so to speak, the importance of ethos to interpretation, and the way images taken almost entirely out of context can provide such apparently persuasive support to banal conspiracy theories. These arguments assume that everything we see from a news outlet (particularly one with a reputation like Fox's) is indicative of central control and deep antipathy towards President Obama. The images thus reinforce and perpetuate a narrative even though human error can far more easily account for the mistakes.