Articles
on Media coverage of the Palestinian-Israeli conflict
Bias and
Fear Tilting Coverage of Israel
When
journalists refuse to tell the truth about Israel
Media and
the Middle East conflict
'Apparent'
'Wrong Turn' 'Signals' 'War'
US media
mirror distorts Middle East
By Mazin Qumsiyeh -
http://al-awda.org
Caught in the Crossfire:
When Palestinian civilians are killed
Retaliation: When Israeli
army or settlers kill Palestinians
Escalation (synonym/can be
used interchangeably with Provocation): Any act of violence or resistance by
the Palestinians
Murdered: When Israeli
Civilians are killed
Brutal/cowardly/ghastly:
adjectives describing attacks on Israelis
Self defense: Any act of
violence by Israelis
Terrorism: Any act of
violence by the Palestinians
Civilians: Armed settlers
are civilians when killed. Try to avoid
using this term for Palestinians.
Neighborhoods: Areas
inhabited by Israeli settlers especially if targeted by shooting (light guns)
Positions: Any Palestinian
towns and villages especially when bombed by helicopter gunships or raked with
large caliber machine guns
Tradegy: Any Israeli death
Deserved: Any Palestinian death
Squatters: Palestinian
natives
Democratic ally: synonym
for Israel
Disputed Areas: Any
Palestinian or Arab land occupied by Israel in defiance of International law.
Anti-Semite: Person
condemns Israeli violations of Palestinian civil and human rights.
Victims: Any Jewish
Israeli
Attacker: Any Palestinian
engaging in any form of resistance (violent or not). Also see terrorist.
Targets: Palestinian
buildings, homes, offices - What the Israeli military designates as military
targets
Attack/bombing/murder:
Acts the Palestinians commit when directed at Israelis
Clashes: This is a
difficult term to understand but is generally used when Palestinians die
Measures (e.g. Economic
measures, security measures): Any acts the Israelis commit (blockades,
collective punishment, shelling neighborhoods, starving a population etc)
Security: Anything the
Israeli government chooses to do. This
can include land confiscation, extra-judicial killings, home demolitions,
destruction of groves,
uprooting trees, blockades
etc. The term security is reserved for
use only with the word Israel or Israeli and must never be applied to
Palestinians.
Lashing out: A term reserved
for Palestinians and acts they commit against Israelis
Under siege: Again a term
for use by the Israelis as in Palestinians have put Israelis under siege. Exact meaning depends on the
circumstances. Never use for
Palestinian towns or villages.
Rules
When to use Passive voice:
if the violent action is committed by Israelis (e.g. 2 Palestinians were
killed, one of them a 9 year old). When
to use active voice: if the action is committed by Palestinians (e.g. Palestinians
killed a Jewish child, Palestinians kills teenager).
While reporting about
Israelis use the affirmative tone: "2 Israelis were injured", while
repoting about Palestinian use the verbs claimed, say etc.
"Palestinians say
woman dies of teargas inhalation in West Bank" (e.g. Ha'aretz)
Names must be included for
any Jewish victims, always avoid names for Muslim or Christian victims but use
numbers in stead (remember in the passive voice, e.g. 2 Palestinians died in
clashes).
When an Israeli is killed,
it is important to note his or her profession, where he/she is from and was
going, whether or not he/she is religious, and whether or not he/she is an
immigrant from the U.S. or Russia. If the dead person is
survived by a spouse and
children, this should be noted. If the victim is a youngster, the school they
attended should be mentioned, and their friends' feelings should be noted. in
general, people who knew the dead person should
testify to their humanity.
When a Palestinian is
killed, they should not be personalized in any way.
When an Israeli is killed,
it is useful to include graphic descriptions of the death scene - the covered
body, the fragments of flesh, the path of flowing
blood, etc.
I hope this is helpful (please send me
more). Please ensure that your local
media editor/journalist receives this list.
By Norman Solomon *
Creators Syndicate, April 19, 2001
A couple of weeks ago, the New York Times finally printed the name of a 12-year-old organization called Rabbis for Human Rights. But the mention had to be bought -- in a full-page ad expressing support for actions by the group, which is "the only Israeli rabbinic association that includes Orthodox, Reform, Reconstructionist and Conservative rabbis."
Days before the advertisement appeared on April 8, the executive director of Rabbis for Human Rights had been arrested while participating in nonviolent civil disobedience against Israeli demolition of houses. "Palestinian homes are being systematically bulldozed all over the West Bank," said a bulletin from Rabbi
Arthur Waskow, director of the Shalom Center in Philadelphia. "In this case, there isn't any pretense of 'security interests' or 'military targets.' The houses destroyed yesterday and today belong to ordinary Palestinian citizens whose only crime is the
wish to have a roof over their heads."
Groups like Rabbis for Human Rights, and Jewish American activists like Rabbi Waskow who vocally oppose Israeli policies, get short shrift in U.S. news outlets. Meanwhile, the reporting on the Israeli-Palestinian cycle of violence is badly skewed by an endless cycle of media bias.
Searching the Nexis database of U.S. media coverage during the first 100 days of this year, I found several dozen stories using the phrases "Israeli retaliation" or "Israel retaliated." During the same period, how many stories used the phrases "Palestinian retaliation" or "Palestinians retaliated"? One.
Both sides of the conflict, of course, describe their violence as retaliatory. But only one side routinely benefits from having its violent moves depicted that way by major American media. The huge disparity in the media frame is a measure of the overall slant of news coverage.
To help maintain pressure for a favorable media tilt, supporters of Israel have a not-so-secret weapon, brandished most effectively as a preemptive threat -- the charge of anti-Semitism. Any Americans who speak out against Israel's extreme disregard for human rights are liable to be in the line of fire.
Elie Wiesel, a Holocaust survivor and Nobel Prize winner, is a reminder that victims of tyranny are capable of later aligning themselves with perpetrators of enormous cruelty. Last month, Wiesel delivered a speech to a national conference of the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, one of Washington's most powerful lobbying groups. Wiesel declared that anyone "who uses their Jewishness as a context to attack or condemn Israel --
that's something I'm against." And he denounced criticisms of Israel as "anti-Semitism in Jewish leftist circles."
Such salvos are warning shots that Joseph McCarthy would have understood. To quash debate, just smear, smear, smear.
Instead of trying to refute critiques of Israeli policies, it's much easier to equate criticism of Israel with anti-Semitism – a timeworn way of preventing or short-circuiting real debate on the merits of the issues. It is absurd and dangerous to claim that bigotry is at the root of calls for adherence to basic standards of human rights. But the ongoing threat of the "anti-Semitic" label helps to prevent U.S. media coverage from getting out of
hand.
Last year, I had an interesting experience with one of Florida's daily papers, the Palm Beach Post. A reader's letter, published in early June, charged that a column I'd written "had an anti-Semitic undertone" because it criticized media spin for Israel. Eleven weeks later, on Aug. 25, the newspaper printed a second letter from the same reader, objecting to a column I wrote about Sen. Joseph Lieberman. This time the letter was more emphatic and
sweeping, though less specific: "I have noticed in some of his previous columns, he is apt to express anti-Semitic views."
The Palm Beach Post printed my weekly syndicated column 30 times during 2000 -- for the last time on Aug. 19, six days before publication of the second letter accusing me of being "anti-Semitic." After that letter came off the press, my column never again appeared in the Palm Beach Post. When I inquired, the newspaper's opinion-page editor told me: "There was no connection."
Whatever the case may be, there's no doubt that journalists generally understand critical words about Israel to be hazardous to careers. "Rarely since the Second World War has a people been so vilified as the Palestinians," comments Robert Fisk, a longtime foreign correspondent for the London-based daily Independent. "And rarely has a people been so frequently excused
and placated as the Israelis."
Fisk is asking his colleagues to search their consciences: "Our gutlessness, our refusal to tell the truth, our fear of being slandered as 'anti-Semites' -- the most loathsome of libels against any journalist --means that we are aiding and abetting terrible deeds in the Middle East."
Anti-Semitism is a reality in the world. Like all forms of religious and racial bigotry, it should be unequivocally opposed. The effectiveness of such opposition is undermined by those who cry wolf, using charges of anti-Semitism as a weapon in a propaganda arsenal to defend Israel's indefensible crimes against Palestinian people.
'Fear of being slandered as "anti-Semites" means we are abetting terrible deeds in the Middle East'
Robert Fisk
Independent - UK, 17 April 2001 http://argument.independent.co.uk/commentators/story.jsp?story=66956
What if we had supported the apartheid regime of South Africa against the majority black population? What if we had lauded the South African white leadership as "hard-line warriors" rather than racists? What if we had explained the shooting of 56 black protesters at Sharpeville as
an understandable "security crackdown" by the South African police. And described black children shot by the police as an act of "child sacrifice" by their parents? What if we had called upon the "terrorist" ANC leadership to "control their own people".
Almost every day that is exactly the way we are playing the Israeli-Palestinian war. No matter how many youths are shot dead by the Israelis, no matter how many murders - by either side - and no matter how bloody the reputation of the Israeli Prime Minister, we are reporting this terrible conflict as if we supported the South African
whites against the blacks. No, Israel is not South Africa (though it happily supported the apartheid regime) and no, the Palestinians are not the blacks of the shanty towns. But there's not much difference between Gaza and the black slums of Johannesburg; and there's not much difference between the tactics of the Israeli army in the occupied territories and that of the South African police. The apartheid regime
had death squads, just as Israel has today. Yet even they did not use helicopter gunships and missiles.
Rarely since the Second World War has a people been so vilified as the Palestinians. And rarely has a people been so frequently excused and placated as the Israelis. Israeli embassies are now buttonholing editors around the world, saying that it's not fair to call Israel's Prime Minister "hard-line". And the reporters are falling into line.
Sharon, we are told, may turn into a pragmatist, another De Gaulle; in truth he's more like the French putschist generals in Algeria. They also used torture and massacred their Arab opponents. It needed an Israeli writer - Nehemia Strasler, in Ha'aretz - to point out that Sharon's career spells anything but peace. He voted against the peace
treaty with Egypt in 1979. He voted against a withdrawal from southern Lebanon in 1985. He opposed Israel's participation in the Madrid peace conference in 1991. He opposed the Knesset plenum vote on the Oslo agreement in 1993. He abstained on a vote for peace with Jordan in
1994. He voted against the Hebron agreement in 1997. He condemned the manner of Israel's retreat from Lebanon in 2000. He is now building Jewish settlements on occupied Arab land - in total violation of international law at a faster rate than his predecessor.Yet we are to believe that it is the corrupt, Parkinson's-haunted Yasser Arafat who is to blame for the war. He will not "control" his people. He is chastised by George Bush while his people are bestialized by the Israeli leadership. Rafael Eytan, the former Israeli chief of staff, used to talk of the Palestinians as "cockroaches in a glass
jar". Menachem Begin called them "two-legged beasts". Rabbi Ovdia Yousef, the spiritual head of the Shas party, called them "serpents". In August last year, Ehud Barak called them "crocodiles". Last month, the Israeli tourism minister, Rehavem Zeevi, called Arafat a "scorpion". Even the South African regime never called the blacks by such vile names.And woe betide the diplomat or journalist who points this out. Earlier this year, the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, in Paris, accused the Swedish president of the European Union of "encouraging anti-Jewish violence". To condemn Israel for "eliminating terrorists", the centre wrote in aletter to the Swedish prime minister, "recalls the allied argument during the Second World War, according to which bombing the railways leading to Auschwitz would encourage anti-Semitism among the Germans". Sweden was making "a unilateral attack against the state of the survivors of the Holocaust". And the Swedish president's crime? She haddared to say that "the practice of eliminations constitutes an obstacle to peace and could provoke new violence". She did not even refer to death squads.
In February Newsweek propagated a virtual fraud on its cover by showing - under the headline "Terror Goes Global - Exclusive: Bin Laden's International Network" - a frightening photograph of a man (head and shoulders), his face covered in an Arab scarf, holding a rifle in his right hand. The reader would imagine this to be a member
of Osama bin Laden's network of "global terror". But I traced the Finnish photographer who took this picture. He snapped it at a funeral on the West Bank. The man was an armed member of the Palestinian Tanzim militia -- and had nothing to do with Bin Laden. The Tanzim are violent
enough. But the cover generically smeared the entire Palestinian people by associating them with the man supposedly responsible for bombing US embassies in Africa.
As that brave American writer Charley Reese said in his regular US column, the Israelis "have created their own unconquerable enemy". They have made the Palestinians so crushed, so desperate, so humiliated that
they have nothing to lose. We, too, have done this. Our gutlessness, our refusal to tell the truth, our fear of being slandered as "anti-Semites" - the most loathsome of libels against any journalist – means that we are aiding and abetting terrible deeds in the Middle East. Maybe we should look up those cuttings of the apartheid era and
remember when men were not without honour.
Brian Whitaker on the dangers of sloppy journalism
Monday April 9, 2001
A familiar tale from the Middle East: "Palestinians launched three bombs
overnight against the Eile Sinai settlement in the far north of the Gaza Strip.
Israeli troops responded with tank shells, destroying a Palestinian border post
and hitting two houses."
This report, which happens to have come from the BBC, is familiar not
only for the events it describes but also for the way it describes them: the
Palestinians attack and the Israelis "respond".
Military actions by the Israelis are always a "response" to
something, even when they strike first. If they haven't actually been attacked,
it's a "response" to a security threat.
"Response" is a very useful word. It provides a ready-made
reason for the Israelis' actions and neatly brushes off demands for further
explanation. It says: "Don't ask us why we did it, ask the other
side."
There's no point in blaming the Israelis for using this device; the
question is whether journalists should let it shape their reporting of the
conflict.
Portraying the conflict as a series of Palestinian actions and Israeli
responses is dangerous, for several reasons.
Firstly, it lends support to the Israeli argument that if only the
Palestinians would stop their violence everything would be fine. That might be
true for many Israelis, but not for the Palestinians.
Secondly, it builds up - through constant repetition - into a misleading
picture of the overall conflict. The violence is not a series of discrete
actions and reactions but a cycle (or spiral) in which actions on both sides
feed off those on the other.
Thirdly, while Israeli actions are reported as a self-justifying
"response", actions by the Palestinians are rarely allowed either a
proper context or an understandable motive.
Obviously there is a limit to what can be said in a news story of
300-400 words, and some journalists will argue that their main job is to report
the day's events, not to explain the background.
But I am not suggesting they should turn it into a history lecture;
merely that they should at least hint at a broader picture and acknowledge that
the Palestinians might have some genuine grievances.
To do this is neither difficult nor unduly word-consuming. Some news
agency reports, for instance, routinely work into their stories a five-word
reference to the "Palestinian struggle against Israeli occupation".
The Israeli occupation lies at the root of the conflict - and yet, more
often than not, journalists fail to remind their readers of it.
The Guardian's electronic newspaper archive contains all the British
national dailies, plus the London Evening Standard. A search of this reveals
1,669 stories published during the last 12 months that mentioned the West Bank.
Of these, 49 contained the phrase "occupied West Bank". A
further 513 included the word "occupied" or "occupation"
elsewhere in the text. That leaves 1,107 stories - 66% of the total - which
managed to talk about the West Bank without mentioning one of the key facts.
Some journalists - particularly Americans - seem reluctant to treat
occupation as an established fact and instead treat it as an opinion which
should be attributed to someone. Last October, for example, CCN's Jerusalem
bureau chief told viewers that Palestinians were angry at "what they
regard as the Israeli occupation".
Others resort to euphemisms: the West Bank is "disputed" or
"administrated by Israel". Some adopt the practice of Israeli
officials by shortening "the Occupied Territories" to "the
Territories".
Journalists are also rather timid on the question of Jewish settlers,
usually portraying them as a target of violence but more rarely as one of the
major causes (which they plainly are). Some of the recent stories about the
killing of a 10-month-old Jewish baby, Shalhevet Pass, in Hebron made clear
that the settlers there are a tiny and particularly fanatical bunch - though
many did not.
One report described Hebron as a "divided city", when in fact
99.8% of the inhabitants are Arabs. (Jerusalem, on the other hand - with
two-thirds of the population Jewish and one-third Arab - is constantly
described by Israelis as "undivided".)
Over the last 12 months, 394 stories in the archive mentioned Jewish
settlers. Of these, seven included the phrase "extremist settler" and
eight "extremist Jewish settler". The word "extremist" did
occur in 44 of the stories, though not necessarily applied to settlers. Some
stories juxtaposed settlers characterised simply as "Jewish" with
Palestinians characterised as "extremist".
The illegality of the settlements under international law also often
escapes mention. The phrase "illegal settlement", used in an
Israeli-Palestinian context, appeared only eight times during the last 12
months - and three of those were in readers' letters to the editor.
During the early stages of the intifada newspapers were accused of
"dehumanising" Palestinians by publishing numbers but not names of
those killed. This was contrasted with the wealth of personal information,
helpfully provided by the Israeli authorities, about Jewish casualties.
The lack of Palestinian names was certainly not due to a conscious
policy on the part of journalists and, although there are sometimes
difficulties in getting the names, efforts have been made to remedy it.
However, last week's search of the archive highlighted another practice
which has a similar effect: Jews mainly live in "communities" but
Palestinians live in "areas".
Palestinian "areas" scored 109 mentions over the last 12
months; "neighbourhoods" scored 15 and "communities" only
three (one each in the Guardian, Observer and Independent).
In the case of Jews, the positions were reversed:
"communities" scored 87, "neighbourhoods" 30 and
"areas" 21.
This is clearly not intentional and it may be partly due to the way we
speak of Jewish communities in the diaspora. But the overall pattern does
suggest a perception - perhaps an unconscious one - that Palestinians are less
civilised. Another factor is that "neighbourhood" and, to a lesser
extent, "community" are used as euphemisms for settlements. Israeli
spokesmen regularly describe the settlement at Gilo as a
"neighbourhood" of Jerusalem because it has been unilaterally
annexed.
A recent report in the Times, following in the tradition of CNN, said
that "Palestinians regard" Gilo as an illegal settlement. Indeed they
do, but then so does international law.
Email
brian.whitaker@guardian.co.uk
THE
INDEPENDENT, DECEMBER 13, 2000.
Robert
Fisk
In
the Middle East jungle, a journalist has to expect a few sticks and stones. A
Bahrain newspaper cartoonist once depicted me as a rabid dog (fit, of course,
for extermination), and Cairo's most lickspittle columnist called me "a
crow pecking at the corpse of Egypt" .
But
the degree of abuse and outright threats now being directed at anyone --
academic, analyst, reporter -- who dares to criticise Israel (or dares to tell
the truth about the Palestinian uprising) is fast reaching McCarthyite
proportions. Take Edward Said, the brilliant Palestinian academic who is a
professor at Columbia University.
He
has been facing unprecedented abuse from the Zionist Organisation of America,
which last year demanded that he be fired from the Modern Language Association
and which now demands on an almost daily basis his dismissal from his
professorship at Columbia -- solely because he points out, with clinical
ferocity and painful accuracy, the historical tragedy of Palestinian
dispossession, the brutality of Israel's continued occupation and the
bankruptcy of the Oslo "peace" agreement. Columbia University has
issued an unprecedented public defence of Said and "the fundamental values
of a great university", quoting John Stuart Mill and adding that to give
way to the Jewish
lobby's demand would be "a threat to us all and to
academic freedom".
Too
true. Noam Chomsky -- himself Jewish -- is one of the most profound
philosophers of our age, but his scathing reviews of the Israeli occupation and
America's blind, unquestioning support for Israel now earn him ever more
ruthless abuse. In the United States, he wrote recently, a whole population is
kept in ignorance of the facts because "the economic and and military
programmes (of Israel) rely crucially on US support, which is domestically
unpopular and would be far more so if its purposes were known."
Ignorance
of the Middle East is now so firmly adhered to in the US that only a few tiny
newspapers report anything other than Israel's point of view. You won't find
Chomsky in The New York Times. It was put very well by Charlie Reese in a
recent issue of the Orlando Sentinel -- note the boondocks location -- when he
wrote that "Palestinians won't get their independence until Americans get
theirs". But the attempt to force the media to obey Israel's rules is now
international. We must say that Israel is under siege by Palestinians (rather
than occupying Palestinian land), that Palestinians are responsible for the
violence (even though Palestinians are the principal victims), that Arafat
turned down a good deal at Camp David (though he was offered just over 60 per
cent of his land, not 94 per cent), and that Palestinians indulge in child
sacrifice (rather than question why the Israeli troops have shot so many
Palestinian children).
Israeli
ambassadors and Israel's lobbyists have never been such frequent visitors to
European newspaper offices, to complain about reports or reporters, sometimes
in a quite disgraceful manner. The Johannesburg Star -- a sister paper of The
Independent which carries my own Middle East reports -- was confronted by one
pro-Israeli group this year which claimed that I was in some way assisting the
right-wing historian David Irving -- someone I have never met and never wish to
meet. They subsequently withdrew their allegation.
Then
an odd thing happened in Ireland -- at a prize-giving ceremony in memory of a
Belfast journalist. Mark Sofer, Israel's ambassador in Dublin, had been invited
to talk about reporting in conflict zones to journalism students under the
auspices of Co-operation Ireland, a charitable movement dedicated to
North-South relations. But at one point he chose to use the opportunity to
attack my own reporting of the Middle East, to suggest that it should not be
read or believed. Mr Sofer is, of course, entitled to his views -- but not to
air his prejudices in a charitable forum without allowing a right of reply. The
charity has since announced that it "totally dissociates itself" from
the ambassador's remarks. So it should. And yet it goes on. In South Africa, in
Europe, in Australia -- I still treasure the five pages of abuse in an
Australian lobby group's magazine headlined "The Ignoble Scribe" and
accusing me of a "stupor of self-deception". Oddly, you can now learn
more from the Israeli press than the American media. The brutality of Israeli
soldiers is fully covered in Ha'aretz, which also reports on the large number
of US negotiators who are Jewish. Four years ago, a former Israeli soldier
described in an Israeli newspaper how his men had looted a village in southern
Lebanon; when the piece was reprinted in The New York Times, the looting
episode was censored out of the text.
So here's just one final question. If Arab ambassadors and
lobbyists behaved like their Israeli opposite numbers, would we listen to them?
Would we respect them? Would we run for cover and print only one side of the
story? Would we tell?
Press Clips by Cynthia Cotts
'Apparent' 'Wrong Turn' 'Signals' 'War' – The
Village Voice – October 18, 2000 Slouching
Toward Jerusalem
Journalists
needed a world-class spin detector to make sense of the Middle East last week.
The factual apocalypse arrived in the form of three big news stories on October
12: the "apparent terrorist attack" that killed 17 U.S. Sailors in
Yemen, the Palestinian mob-killing of two Israeli soldiers who took a
"wrong turn," and the Israeli attacks on Palestinian targets that
Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak called a "signal" of readiness but
not a "provocation" to war.
CNN's Christiane
Amanpour lucked out, landing an exclusive October 12 interview with Barak that
will easily stand the test of time. But the sheer volume of contradictions in
that day's stories left many reporters performing triage, nailing down as many
details as possible while abandoning others to the realm of the unknown. With
so many holes came the temptation to report things that may or may not have
been true.
Temptation
#1: Name
Osama bin Laden as the prime suspect in the "terrorist attack." After
Clinton denounced the attack, Daffy Duck-style, as "despicable," word
went out that Yemen is considered a "safe haven" for terrorist
groups, including the bin Laden network. The New York Post made hay with
this tip the next day, under the headline "Bin Laden's signature all over
it." A day later, the Daily News slapped bin Laden on the cover
with usual suspects Saddam Hussein and Abu Nidal.
Neither tabloid
mentioned the caveat, repeatedly issued by U.S. officials, that there was as
yet no hard evidence linking the attack to any particular group. But that
disclaimer did appear in The New York Times, which is bending over backward
these days to avoid pointing the finger at suspects. Near the top of a Times
front-pager on October 15, John F. Burns stressed for the umpteenth time in
days that investigators still "have no firm leads on the identity or
motive of the attackers."
Temptation
#2:
Depict the dead Israelis as innocents who got lost on the way to headquarters.
This was the story put out by Barak, who claimed the two were detained at a
checkpoint and taken to the Ramallah police station, where they were torn limb
from limb. When Palestinians called the two undercover "spies," Barak
denied it, pointing out that they were driving a vehicle with an Israeli
license. (A fascinating detail, but hardly dispositive of the spies claim.)
The Times'
Deborah Sontag reported both sides of this story, but she seemed to ignore the
implications of one set of sources: According to eyewitnesses, Sontag reported,
the soldiers drove directly into the city center, where a crowd was gathering
for the funeral of a Palestinian victim.
Hmm. The
Washington Post's Keith B. Richburg was skeptical enough of the "wrong
turn" story to report that the soldiers "apparently" got
lost—and to allow a Palestinian man to ask the obvious: What the hell were two
Israeli soldiers doing in the middle of Ramallah?
Temptation
#3:
Downplay the Palestinian body count. It's been widely reported that the latest
cycle has killed about 100 people so far, almost all of them Palestinians. Yet
dead Arabs don't get the same play as dead Jews.
Case in point:
12-year-old Muhammad al-Durrah, a Palestinian who was killed by Israeli
soldiers during crossfire on September 30, and whose death was captured on
video by a French TV crew. The Times ran the TV image on the front page
of its late edition October 1, though al-Durrah's name did not appear in the
story. The next day, the Times ran a front-pager noting that "the
riots claimed their first Israeli victim today," with an al-Durrah sidebar
inside. The accompanying photo showed no face, only the site where "a
12-year-old" was killed.
The Times
first united al-Durrah's name and face in an October 8 Week in Review piece
titled "Sticks and Stones: A Deadly Brand of Child's Play." This
time, the photo was wrapped in spin, with the Israeli army claiming that
"both father and son had been part of the crowd throwing stones and
Molotov cocktails" and that Palestinian leaders were now paying parents to
turn their children into martyrs.
By contrast,
consider how the Times played last week's money shot of a Palestinian
waving his bloodstained hands out the window of the Ramallah police station. On
October 13, they plastered that shot on the front page, with the hands blown up
to the size of subway tokens. No ambiguity there—and no replay with Arab spin.
And what about
Khalil Bader, the Palestinian whose funeral was preempted by the lynching? The Los
Angeles Times at least reported his name. Times reporters were too
busy interviewing the families of Israeli and American casualties and obtaining
their head shots for the October 14 edition.
Temptation
#4: Play
down the incendiary role of Ariel Sharon, leader of Israel's right-wing Likud
party. It's generally agreed that Sharon "sparked" the latest cycle
of violence when he visited Jerusalem's Temple Mount on September 28. But as of
last week, the media had largely left him behind closed doors. Two Times stories
October 9 only mentioned in passing the fact that Sharon wants to be foreign
minister. And on October 12, when Barak announced his plan to form a new
government, most reporters seemed blind to the power play at hand.
Instead,
editorialists ganged up to make Arafat the bogeyman. The Washington Post
was diplomatic in its editorial of October 13, saying, "If [Sharon] hoped
by means of his provocative visit to the Temple Mount to undermine [the peace
process], he has succeeded. But he has succeeded only because Yasser Arafat
made it so. Mr. Arafat did not simply refuse to call off . . . the riots; he
actively and deliberately stoked them."
The Times
October 13 editorial echoed the lesser-of-two-evils scenario. "As angry as
he appeared yesterday," said the Times, "Mr. Barak seems
prepared to do what he can to halt the bloodshed. Mr. Arafat has shown no such
inclination in recent days, even though everyone knows that he can break the
cycle of conflict."
One exception to
the Arafat-bashing came from The Wall Street Journal, whose October 13
international page delivered a sharp analysis of Sharon, under the headline
"An Old Soldier Who Isn't Fading Away." It noted that Sharon failed
to prevent the massacre of Palestinian refugees in Lebanon in 1982.
But top honors
go to CNN's Amanpour, who posed tough questions to Barak. Having pointed out
that "there is no parity whatsoever" between the firepower of the
Israeli army and the Palestinian civilians, she challenged the view that the
Palestinians are solely responsible for the escalating violence. Barak
responded with a classic denial: "We are not creating the
provocation."
But
it was another answer that resonated loudest, inviting viewers to draw their
own conclusions. When Amanpour repeated Arafat's claim that Israel had declared
war on the West Bank, Barak sputtered, "That's nonsense, bullshit, and
propaganda."
Independent, June 10, 1998
US media mirror distorts Middle East
By Robert Fisk in Beirut
NOT LONG ago, I came across an American colleague of
mine in the Marriott Hotel in Cairo.
After three years as Middle East correspondent for
his East Coast paper, my friend was leaving Egypt for
the States; American editors have a habit of moving
their reporters to other beats the moment they have
begun to understand the region. So how were things on
the paper, I asked?
"Usual problems," he replied. "I've just been asked
by my paper to stop referring to 'the right-wing
Israeli government'. My editor said he'd been getting
lots of complaints from members of the Jewish
community back home. So now we just call it 'the
Israeli government'." He shrugged his shoulders.
I wasn't surprised. American media coverage of the
Middle East has been largely pro-Israeli - and in
their cartoons of Arabs almost racist - for decades,
and United States reporting of the Israeli-Arab
conflict, with honourable exceptions such as the
Christian Science Monitor, is bland to the point of
tedium.
The State Department line on the Middle East, always
skewed toward Israel, has been followed obsequiously
by most American reporters. Only weeks after United
States diplomats were instructed to refer to the
Israeli-occupied West Bank as "disputed" - rather than
"occupied" - territory, American journalists began
using precisely the same word.
The explosive issue of Israel's expanding Jewish
settlements on occupied land, in contravention of
United Nations resolutions and the Oslo agreement, has
been turned into an argument over real estate.
Bill Clinton's administration has to take account of
extensive American newspaper and television coverage
of the region - and its pro Israeli bias. Yet now,
with a catastrophe looming and American public opinion
desperately in need of an unbiased coverage of events,
the same David-and-Goliath story of Israel and the
Arabs is being regurgitated by press and television.
US journalists thus bear a heavy responsibility for
their country's crumbling policies in the Middle East.
There is nothing new in this lop-sided reporting.
After the Sabra and Chatila massacre in 1982, when up
to 2,000 Palestinian civilians were slaughtered by
Israel's Phalangist allies, Newsweek magazine decided
that the death of Princess Grace of Monaco in a road
accident was the more important story; a week later,
their cover story reported "Israel in Torment" over
the massacres; there was no reference to the "torment"
of the Palestinian victims.
Not once were the Sabra and Chatila murderers called
"terrorists", which they were by Israel's own
definition of the word, presumably because they were
allied to the Israeli army.
The same double standards applied in later years:
when Palestinians set off suicide bombs among
civilians in Israel, the American press universally
called the culprits "terrorists", which they assuredly
were. But when an Israeli slaughtered 29 innocent
Palestinian worshippers in a Hebron mosque, the US
media called the murderer a "fanatic", an "extremist"
or, a new and popular word found increasingly in the
American press, a "zealot". Even the assassin of
Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin - a Jewish
student - was never called a "terrorist".
In this, American journalists have fallen into line
with Israeli law. Only last month the family of a
Palestinian named Khairi Moussa, who was stabbed to
death by an ultra-Orthodox Jew, was refused state
compensation because, under Israeli law, an Arab
killed by a Jew cannot be considered a victim of
"terrorism", although a Jew killed by an Arab can be.
(Needless to say, scarcely any space was devoted to
this extraordinary court case in the pages of US
newspapers.)
Similar attempts to play down Israel's
responsibility for killings in the Middle East could
be identified in 1996 when Israeli artillery
slaughtered 106 Lebanese refugees sheltering in a UN
battalion headquarters at Qana in southern Lebanon.
The Israelis claimed they were firing at Hizbollah
guerrillas 600 feet from the base - not a single
Israeli was hurt and the Hizbollah were firing at a
hill to the south of Qana. But beneath a photograph of
one of the 55 children massacred by the Israelis, Time
magazine reported that the small victim had been
"killed in crossfire" - a palpable untruth.
In one of the most extraordinary reports of its kind
ever written, the New York Times played down the
killing - five days before Qana - of four children and
two women when an Israeli helicopter fired a missile
into an ambulance in southern Lebanon; not until the
sixth paragraph of his report next day did the paper's
Jerusalem correspondent, Serge Schmemann, tell his
readers about the atrocity. Earlier paragraphs of his
report included news of a power failure in a bombarded
Israeli town and a statistic of 24 dead in Lebanon
"including one Israeli soldier".
The Washington Post's reporter John Lancaster later
investigated the ambulance attack, reporting that the
driver was "disputing" [sic] Israel's claim, a false
one as it turned out, that the vehicle was owned by
the Hizbollah. But the paper did not question how
Israel could break the rules of war by firing at a
clearly marked ambulance. The New York Times later ran
a syndicated account from an Israeli paper of an
Israeli soldier's life in Qana before the massacre:
but the New York Times deleted a paragraph about how
the Israeli troops had stolen cars from their Lebanese
owners and looted houses - thus even censoring the
Israeli press.
Time magazine enthusiastically took up the use of
the word "disputed" for the Jewish settlements on Arab
land. By last year, it was able to report on how
Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu "turns up
the heat by okaying [sic] new houses [sic] in disputed
[sic] territory". When Mr Netanyahu ordered work to
begin on a new settlement on a hill outside east
Jerusalem early this year, almost every American news
outlet referred to the "disputed" hill as Har Homa -
giving the location its Jewish identity but usually
ignoring its Arab name, Jebel Abu Ghoneim.
The use of the misleading word "disputed" has,
sadly, turned up on the BBC, along with references to
settlements as "neighbourhoods" and "communities", as
if their occupants were ordinary property buyers
rather than fanatical, armed religious Jews who
believe God gave them the territory.
As long ago as 1995, Jerrold Kessel was reporting on
a settlement "dispute" on CNN in which he referred to
Jews talking of "heritage claims going back hundreds
of years". But "heritage claims" differ mightily; the
Palestinian one is based on land deeds and documents
of ownership, the Israeli one on theology and an
apparent conviction that God had bequeathed Israel the
Arab land.
History continues to be short-changed in the
American media. Long after most of the world realised
that the Oslo "peace process" was dead, US reporters
continued to write about putting the peace process
"back on track", and wrote glowing articles about the
supposedly tough talking US Secretary of State,
Madeleine Albright, even after she told a press
conference in Jerusalem that it was wrong to compare
killing people with "building houses", her own bland
reference to Jewish settlements on occupied land.
In Paris, Le Monde was last month warning its
readers that Mr Netanyahu and US House speaker Newt
Gingrich were "dangerous" men. But in the New York
Times, the increasingly messianic Thomas Friedman, an
old colleague and friend of mine, was telling his
readers that there was "a potentially great statesman"
inside Mr Netanyahu who "deserves credit for the fact
that there has been relatively little Palestinian
terrorism [sic] these past two years". After one
terrible suicide bombing in Jerusalem, the mother of
an Israeli girl victim wrote that it was Mr
Netanyahu's policies rather than the Palestinians who
had killed her daughter. The Los Angeles Times put the
bombing on page one, and the mother's remarkable
statement on page five.
Academics may one day decide how deeply the American
public has been misled by the persistent bias of the
US media, and the degree to which this has led them to
support US policies which may destroy America's
prestige in the Middle East.
Meanwhile, US reporters aregoing to have to figure
out a way of telling readers and viewers how a
"dispute" over "neighbourhoods" is turning into war.