It's Media Pointing Camera

About

It's Media Pointing Camera refers to the political cartoon showing a camera man pointing a camera at two men who are running, with one running away from the other. In the cartoon, it is shown that one man is running away from another who is chasing him while holding up a knife. In the lens of the camera, however, it is shown that the man who is running away is portrayed as the aggressor, with his foot being pointed as if he is holding a knife. Online, this image has been used in various Object Labeling to show different things are not as they are portrayed.

Origin

The political cartoon first started to be seen online in early 2012, where various political blogs and forums would post it as part of a conversation on how the mainstream media is believed to change the bias of things by portraying them differently. On July 17th, 2013, the Redditor u/gnomegnome^[1] uploaded a question to the Subreddit r/tipofmytongue in which they described the meme as 'The meme is about different perspectives. There is a cartoon guy chasing another guy and it looks like he is holding a knife but I think it was the others guys foot or something like that and it shows a camera guy taking a picture that captures the moment weird.

Sorry about how vague this is, any help is appreciated!' and received the following image as the solution (shown below).

Spread

Following the meme's usage on Reddit, it started to appear in other websites with various types of changes done to it. On May 21st, 2014, the Tumblr user bellajuiicybaby^[2] uploaded a version of the image in which there was a red circle added to the meme, as well as the text 'The Media' added to the camera to make it overly obvious what the meaning behind it was (shown below).

The meme continued to be used sparingly over the next decade, only used in political arguments in which one side attempted to say that media bias was at fault for something being perceived a certain way. In early 2020s, however, it started to see a resurgence with people using it as an object labeling meme. In 2022, the imgflip user BrianTaylor2^[3] uploaded a version of the meme in which every character is labeled in various ways, making the meme be about narcs and victims, with narcs on YouTube being the media in the example (shown below).

Various Examples

Template

Search Interest

External References