"Every picture tells a story don't it?," sang Rod Stewart, while that old canard about a picture being worth a thousand words is still invoked by editors, and, at negotiating time, by every press photographer anxious to boost a fee.

Photojournalism has always had an edge in shaping how we understand world events. You can never underestimate the power of an image to define a story; compelling images become the private movie we screen in our minds to help us extract meaning from what we see.

But, clearly, images are often not what they seem to be. In an age of airbrushing and digital enhancement, when colors, backgrounds, and images can be punched in and punched up electronically and undetectably, how trustworthy are pictures? Advertisers and governments alike have been shameless manipulators, from the first heroic socialist realist posters celebrating the "New Soviet Man" that defined one form of propaganda, to the far more carefully constructed advertising campaigns that base their images on psychological probing and focus group research. "Underexposed," the June, 1999 issue of Index On Censorship, features propaganda photographs used during the 20th century. Some of these striking images have been posted in the gallery pages of the Electronic Telegraph, an online U.K. newspaper.

Look around. You cannot escape today's visual assault—on the streets, in the subways, in books and magazines and, yes, in the news too. What's true? Ask the Time magazine editor who darkened the face of O.J. Simpson on the cover because he wanted it clear that O.J. was a black man. Ask the many official ministers of information and pr experts who daily sanitize their clients with photos chronicling deceptive stories and heroic accomplishments. We can marvel at the techniques utilized throughout the last century to twist the truth and bend the facts, and new technologies only make it easier. One of the first media controversies of our new century involves U.S. TV network CBS inserting its logo digitally into news broadcasts, replacing the billboards of a competing network with their own. This electronic, undetectable altering of live news footage demonstrates the potential of such stealth technology.

So, yes, there are errors of commission, and they are not that hard to dissect, especially with the passage of time. It's always easier looking back at contrived and calculated misinformation. We now know what really happened, or so we think, and so can pass judgment with ease on the distortions and manipulations of an earlier error. When we see Hitler goosestep into history on those grainy archival films from seventy years ago, we ask ourselves why it wasn't obvious to all, including the German people, that he was a fraud. Comic Charlie Chaplin realized it early on—but millions were captivated by the carefully fashioned portrait that Adolph created to promote the mystique of fascism.

But the Fuhrer, to cite the world's most hated and now cartoonish character, was then—what's now? Goebbels had nothing on the modern practitioners of public relations and political consulting who specialize in the packaging of politicians and the selling of what passes for ideas. The trick book has expanded with state-of-the-art refinements and the power of the most powerful media in history, a weapon of mass distraction unknown in the days of the totalitarian terrors. The commissars used images to mobilize people and spread ideology. Today, so-called "free market"-driven propaganda has been commercialized and corporatized. Its goal is to depoliticize society. The message: shut up and shop. Images are used for branding while logos are plastered on our clothing turning us into human billboards as our political culture gets swamped by consumer culture.

I am a television producer, a believer in visual media. I am also very conscious of something worse than commission: omission. The media today is like the frog in the well. The frog looks up and sees a tiny circle of sky above him and thinks that's all there is. In America, where we've had a 50 percent cutback in news of the world, the canvas of coverage is shrinking, even as globalization makes world news more essential. We have images but little interpretation.

Soundbites substitute for substance and bang-bang footage is all that we see of complicated conflicts that are presented with no context or background. CBS News and The New York Times asked Americans about Bosnia after four years of nightly coverage that pictured the war as a religious bloodbath; "Who lives in Sarajevo?" was the question. Fifty percent answered: "The Serbs." Wrong! Twenty-five percent said they didn't know. The overwhelming majority of viewers who were exposed only to the snappy pictures of horrors had little clue about what the war was all about, who was fighting whom, or even who lives there.

Another contemporary example. Lori Berenson is a young American woman from New York. She was jailed by a military tribunal in Peru, convicted, falsely in my view, of being a terrorist. But the hooded judge who presided over the mockery of her trial overrode the prosecutors' demand for 30 years, giving her life instead. Why? Because he saw her speak at what was supposed to be a televised press conference and she looked guilty. Sleep deprived after eleven days in a dank dungeon, she was told to shout because there were no microphones on the stage, and as a result Lori looked like a militant, even a fanatic, when she was hauled by armed guards into a room packed with TV cameras, photographers and government plants shouting "treason to the fatherland." This pseudo "press conference" permitted no questions or answers. Four years later, she has still not been allowed to give a media interview and offer her side of the story. But her fabricated negative image was broadcast worldwide, and carried in all major newspapers, effectively condemning her. She was convicted by an image in a world where perception trumps reality. (On January 11, 2000, Lori Berenson began a hunger strike in prison to dramatize her case)

Obvious isn't it? We need to hold the visual media to the same standards of accuracy as the printed media. Pictures can lie—and liars use pictures. Remember that. Ok, now: SMILE.

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AS THE MEDIA WATCH THE WORLD, WE WATCH THE MEDIA.

The Media Channel is a not-for-profit project of OneWorld and The Global Center, and is produced by Globalvision New Media.