Ceci n’est pas une pipe

Most people would agree that what they see here is a pipe. Not René Magritte. By writing the words ‘Ceci n’est pas une pipe’ he challenged people’s common view and forced them to rethink what they easily would have accepted as the truth. And Magritte turned out to be right. The title of this painting, ‘La trahison des images’, explains that what we see is in fact not a pipe, but an image of a pipe.

Magritte would have been a good journalist. He took the obvious not for granted, but used his own common sense to judge the situation. The treason of images, which makes people see things that do not exist, is comparable with the treason of PR. The journalistic equivalents of René Magritte are the men and women who decide not to listen to PR and government propaganda, to go against the status quo and to challenge it with their own investigation of it.

Like Magritte, they often turn out to be right. In the past, alternative journalists have opposed seemingly unchangeable situations, such as the Vietnam War and colonialism. More recently, when a large part of the world believed that the war in Iraq was a good decision, alternative voices such as John Pilger and Michael Moore challenged it and revealed the lies in the Bush administration’s propaganda.

The importance of alternative voices in journalism is evident. What you see is not always what you get.