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A New Elena Story

Posted by michael on from the old-trees-full-of-iron dept.

SwiftBoy writes "Elena, of motorcycling through Chernobyl fame has gone riding again, this time to dig up the history of Kiev's fortifications. Interesting that after 60 years all that stuff is still there."

5 of 253 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Elena was debunked a while ago. by Jason+Scott · · Score: 5, Insightful

    God dammit.. who the fuck cares if she didnt really ride a motorcycle alone at chernobyl.. the pics are real and are still powerful.. fuck

    Because riding through Chernobyl on a motorcycle would be inherently risky, dangerous, unlawful and maybe even lethal. When a person claims they are portraying an event, with photographs, they are implying they actually experienced that event, unless of course we're in the realm of fantasy. Which would be fine.

    But if a person neither deliniates the photo essay as a fantasy or indicates in some way that you are not seeing what you are being told, then you're letting your audience down, and you're spreading, basically, lies. It's called bad journalism. Some people might not care, like you, my little profane anonymous friend. But a lot of people do.

  2. Re:Wasn't she the one by bersl2 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    If this is all fake, this is one damn good fake.

    What was supposedly fake about it anyway?

  3. Fool me once... by Txiasaeia · · Score: 5, Insightful
    The first Elena story was interesting, moving and touching. Much of the comments on slashdot on the original story said much the same thing. There's something very powerful about a photoblog about a lone woman motorbiking through a deserted (sorta) post-apocalpytic town.

    HOWEVER, once I found out it was faked, I was extremely upset. The original impact of the story was immediately gone, and I felt like I was cheated out of those emotions of awe and wonder. There's no way I'm going to go out on a limb again and trust anything that woman says.

    There was a story here previously about the journalistic quality of blogs on the Internet and how they couldn't touch real journalism. I now understand what that's all about. IMHO, /. shouldn't be giving any credence to Elena after her previous scam was unearthed.

    --
    Condemnant quod non intellegunt.
  4. They have that stuff in Germany, too by goon+america · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Interesting that after 60 years all that stuff is still there

    It's that way in Germany, too. I know that in Hamburg, some of the major bomb shelters were so incredibly massive that they simply never tore them down. They put nightclubs in there now. You can see them pretty easily, they're these huge masses of concrete... one of the most touching things, besides the bombed-out cathedrals left unrestored, and the occasional Kennedyplatze or Eisenhowerstrasse you run into...

    We don't really have a parallel here. This is one of the reasons that I believe that when Americans and Europeans think about war, they actually conceptualize very different things.

  5. Re:Wasn't she the one by mm0mm · · Score: 4, Insightful
    ... she'd just taken some pictures of herself on a motorcycle on the highway and then interspersed them with file photos of Cheronobyl's abandoned areas, then presented them as a photo diary of a trip that never happened.
    and what's the big deal about it? Maybe she fooled us, maybe not. Even if her roadtrip was a lie, that won't change other facts. If this is a fake story I wish Chernobyl's accident was the one "that never happened."

    Even if her story was fake and she made herself a journalist by doing so, she did a darn good job convincing the readers. Anything presented on the web as the truth can be fake or real. It is viewer's responsibility to examine credibility and authenticity of each story and make most out of it. If you can't provide facts to back up your claims to discredit her story, then your allegation, without any valid proof, can be fake as well.

    Her story being fake doesn't change the history of Chernobyl or the fact the area has been, and will be, abandoned for years. If she's told us lies, it is her stupidity and lack of integrity that made her a lier. Big deal. Maybe she just wanted to be in a spotlight. We believed in her story just like we believed in the allegations of Iraq's WMD programs. I believe there are more dangerous lies than hers, even if her story turned out fake. Her "trip," whether fake or not, revealed very significant and important information about the doomed area, and that's all matters to me.