I direct documentaries. Before a single word of narration is written, decisions have already been made that tell the audience how to feel about the person on screen. The shot. The frame. The costume. The background. The light. By the time dialogue arrives, the audience has been instructed, silently, at the level of the image.

That is not opinion. That is craft. Every working communications professional understands it. And that is why I can read the photograph Delfi published on April 22, 2026 alongside its story on the Lithuanian Radio and Television Commission’s fine of Stanislovas Tomas. I can read that image the way a film editor reads a cut. What I see is not editorial accident. It is professional-grade antisemitic framing.

Grant Gochin has documented the legal and institutional architecture in which Delfi operates in A free-speech architecture that runs in only one direction. Michael Kretzmer, Silvia Foti, and Dillon Hosier have separately mapped Lithuania’s prosecutorial selectivity, its state-institutional laundromat, and its documentary record. This piece addresses the element those analyses identified but did not dissect. The photograph. The image is where the state-aligned press speaks when the regulator cannot afford to.

The photograph Delfi selected

Tomas is not Jewish. He is a Lithuanian lawyer and polemicist, controversial on the merits, with a documented public career across the post-Soviet legal space. None of that is the issue. What matters is what Delfi did with his image.

From the entirety of Tomas’s public Facebook record, Delfi selected one photograph. A white kippah on his head. The Western Wall at his side. Two Orthodox Jewish men visible behind him.

There is no news reason for that image. The story is a Lithuanian regulator’s fine against a YouTube video. The video concerned Lithuanian paramilitary history. Jerusalem is not in the frame of the controversy. The Kotel is not in the frame of the controversy. Jewishness is not in the frame of the controversy.

Until Delfi puts it there.

Film has an old rule. Everything inside the frame is intentional. If it was not intentional, it should not be in the frame. The kippah is in the frame. The Kotel is in the frame. The Orthodox men are in the frame. That is an editorial statement, whether the editor acknowledges it or not.

Tomas’s public Facebook contains images of him in courtrooms across post-Soviet jurisdictions. In classrooms. At professional events. At home. None of those alternatives would have communicated what the Kotel image communicates. That is why the Kotel image was chosen.

An editor selecting between plausible photographs is making an argument. When the selection foregrounds the single visual element that has nothing to do with the reported story, the argument is not neutral. The argument is the selection.

Mise-en-scène as antisemitism

In film the totality of the visual frame is called mise-en-scène. It is what the viewer receives at once, before language catches up. The kippah is a visual tag. The Kotel is a symbolic location. The Orthodox figures behind Tomas are iconographic fill. None of these alone carries the load. Together they compose a Jewish reading environment into which the subject is placed.

The reader does not need to say to himself, “This man is........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)