Image 01 Image 03
Sign In or RegisterLogout

Media Bias Tag

Posted by William A. Jacobson on August 26, 2014 15 Comments
I hate when people refer to a column as "important," because the reality is that few columns are important in the real world. But I consider the column at The Tablet written by former AP Middle East reporter Matti Friedman to be important. Readers have been emailing and tweeting the link at me at a somewhat furious pace. Friedman lays bare both the explicit and implicit biases of media coverage of Israel and how that bias is part of a larger narrative seeking Israel's destruction. Here are some excerpts from An Insider’s Guide to the Most Important Story on Earth, but of course, go and read the whole thing and share it widely:
The lasting importance of this summer’s war, I believe, doesn’t lie in the war itself. It lies instead in the way the war has been described and responded to abroad, and the way this has laid bare the resurgence of an old, twisted pattern of thought and its migration from the margins to the mainstream of Western discourse—namely, a hostile obsession with Jews. The key to understanding this resurgence is not to be found among jihadi webmasters, basement conspiracy theorists, or radical activists. It is instead to be found first among the educated and respectable people who populate the international news industry; decent people, many of them, and some of them my former colleagues....

Posted by New Neo on August 25, 2014 46 Comments
On Saturday the WaPo featured a wordy piece devoted to Darren Wilson's dysfunctional family of origin, and the racial and other problems in the police force he used to work for, difficulties that seem to have had nothing whatsoever to do with him. As William A. Jacobson has written, it's an attempt at guilt by association. That effort seems even more biased when it is contrasted with a lengthy AP article published the very next day in the Sunday WaPo that tells us what a great guy Michael Brown was. From Saturday's article about Wilson, Darren Wilson’s first job was on a troubled police force disbanded by authorities:
...[E]veryone leaves a record, and Darren Dean Wilson is no exception. People who know him describe him as someone who grew up in a home marked by multiple divorces and tangles with the law... Wilson has had some recent personal turmoil: Last year, he petitioned the court seeking a divorce from his wife... His parents divorced in 1989, when he was 2 or 3 years old... In 2001, when Wilson was a freshman in high school, his mother pleaded guilty to forgery and stealing. She was sentenced to five years in prison, although records suggest the court agreed to let her serve her sentence on probation.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on August 25, 2014 8 Comments
Slowly, we have seen numerous accounts of how Hamas intimidated foreign journalists into not covering Hamas' use of facilities such as Shifa Hospital and firing of rockets close to hospitals, apartment buildings, religious compounds and U.N. facilities. But it has come slowly, and mostly after reporters had left Gaza. And only after reporters were caught deleting tweets and pulling down stories that exposed the truth. Even Hamas admits to intimidating and controlling journalists -- and brags about it. The Foreign Press Association also admitted to the intimidation, after the fact. Now another report, via Elder of Ziyon, from a Dutch journalist (emphasis added):
Since the war started, one population group in Gaza has disappeared from the streets: people in uniform. Army green uniforms, blue-grey uniforms, black uniforms, they were all over the place. From one day to the next they are gone, the men and the few women (of the women police unit) with a weapon or a truncheon in their hands.

Posted by David Gerstman on August 22, 2014 3 Comments
At his Muckraker column at Forbes, The Media Intifada: Bad Math, Ugly Truths About New York Times In Israel-Hamas War, investigative journalist Richard Behar exposes many of the problems - really scandals - with the MSM reporting on Gaza. Though he focuses a lot on The New York Times, he focuses on other news outlets too and how, through a combination of credulousness, bias and laziness, they have become in the words of his friend, and fellow investigative journalist, Gary Weiss, "part of the Hamas war machine.” In the wake of the Jayson Blair scandal The New York Times led the journalistic pack by hiring a "public editor" to handle complaints in the hopes of averting another similar scandal. But the problem with public editors or ombudsmen, as they are also called, is that they don't challenge the assumptions of the editors and reporters. Rather they seem to be explaining why the readers don't understand the high minded principles that professional journalists adhere to. What's important about Behar's takedown of the reporting is that he challenges the assumptions that news organizations accept. Behar looked at the media in general and specifically at The New York Times "because it is, without question, the most important media outlet in the world, in terms of setting the table each day for other outlets.". I can't cover the whole scope of Behar's critique as it is sweeping and comprehensive, but I'd like to focus on a few of his specific criticisms and then on a few of his observations. Richard Behar Media Intifada Behar's first critique of the Times is for its Gaza based reporter Fares Akram, and what he discovered when he visited Akram's Facebook page.

Posted by David Gerstman on August 18, 2014 11 Comments
Israeli newspapers are reporting on the just disclosed coup attempt by Hamas to dislodge Fatah in the West Bank. The Times of Israel reported:
The Shin Bet said it arrested more than 90 Hamas operatives in May and June, confiscated dozens of weapons that had been smuggled into the West Bank, and seized more than $170,000 aimed at funding attacks. It produced photos of the confiscated weapons and cash and a flowchart of the Hamas operatives who had been questioned, and said they planned a series of massive attacks on Israeli targets, including the Temple Mount, in order to start a widespread conflagration. Indictments are expected to be filed against at least 70 of the suspects. Terror cells were set up in dozens of Palestinian West Bank towns and villages — including in and around Jenin, Nablus, eastern Jerusalem, Ramallah, and Hebron — the Shin Bet said.
There were other details at Ynet:
The plan called for using the intifada as cover to seize rule in Ramallah, which would have been led by the "Mohammed Deif of the West Bank" who currently operates out of Turkey. More than 70 indictments were served in recent days at military tribunals in the West Bank, and they expose the largest coordination effort Hamas has attempted in the area since Operation Defensive Shield more than a decade ago.
The "Mohammed Deif of the West Bank" is Saleh al-Arouri who was also implicated in the planning of the kidnappings and killings of Eyal Yifrach, Gil-ad Shaar and Naftali Fraenkel.

Posted by David Gerstman on August 18, 2014 4 Comments
Israel and its supporters have argued for some time that the news media give a skewed view of Operation Protective Edge because reporters in Gaza are intimidated by Hamas. Perhaps one of the most blatant examples was the disappearing tweet of The Wall Street Journal's Nick Casey, showing a member of Hamas sitting for an interview in Shifa hospital. As Prof Jacobson noted, Casey was subjected to online threats. But the disappearing tweet was consistent Hamas' rules for social media (that also apparently applied to major media organizations), which included "[d]o not publish photos of military commanders." Apparently Casey was in violation of that. Last week the Foreign Press Association in Israel (and not an organization that shrinks from criticizing Israel) decried Hamas' "blatant, incessant, forceful and unorthodox methods" to intimidate journalists. There were still skeptics. Jodi Rudoren, the Jerusalem bureau chief of The New York Times, called the FPA's charge "nonsense." The left wing Israeli paper Ha'aretz also covered the story calling the press "divided" over the issue. Even in the Ha'aretz story, the term"divided" seems generous. The one reporter who spoke on the record to say he hadn't been intimidated, was forced to leave Gaza after he violated Hamas' press guidelines. If there was any remaining doubt about the intimidation, it was removed by an unlikely source, Hamas spokeswoman Yisra al-Mudallel. According to the MEMRI transcript, al-Mudallel said:
Moreover, the journalists who entered Gaza were fixated on the notion of peace and on the Israeli narrative. So when they were conducting interviewers, or when they went on location to report, they would focus on filming the places from where missiles were launched. Thus, they were collaborating with the occupation. These journalists were deported from the Gaza Strip. The security agencies would go and have a chat with these people. They would give them some time to change their message, one way or another. ... We suffered from this problem very much. Some of the journalists who entered the Gaza Strip were under security surveillance. Even under these difficult circumstances, we managed to reach them, and tell them that what they were doing was anything but professional journalism and that it was immoral.

Posted by David Gerstman on August 14, 2014 3 Comments
Yesterday the Washington Institute for Near East published Six Ways Hamas Hamas Could Limit Civilian Casualties in Gaza by Jeffrey White. All of White's suggestions involve separating the combatants from civilians, but as White acknowledges, "... there is little chance the group will implement any of these measures." And why would Hamas change? Human shields have been an effective strategy protecting its fighters. White concludes:
As long as the world sees Israel as the primary mechanism of civilian casualties, and as long as many Gaza civilians continue to be more concerned with "resistance" than their lives, Hamas has no reason to change its way of war.
Though White doesn't write it explicitly, the media has a responsibility to tell the whole story and not just the one that Hamas tells or allows them to. Oren Kessler says this explicitly in Reporters Have Finally Found Hamas. What Took So Long? that was published in The New Republic.
Let me be clear: I admire the bravery required of war correspondents, and I recognize the onerous conditions under which they work. I see no conspiracy behind the inability of many of them to adequately cover Hamas. Instead, I see a collective failure by much of the world’s press to give an accurate rendering of one party to the Gaza fighting, and to lay bare—whether explicitly or more subtly—the restrictions it enforces upon them in so doing.
Take for example, As war with Israel shatters lives, more Gazans question Hamas decisions that appeared in The Washington Post. While there is important information in the report - that Hamas has been alienating the civilian population of Gaza - the report always reminds readers that Gazans resent Israel more. For example:

Posted by Amy Miller on August 10, 2014 10 Comments
A Media Trackers open records request has revealed a secret Google group aimed at helping liberals influence public policy by driving the media narrative. "Gamechanger Salon" is a (now not-so-) secret Google group with a membership of over 1000 left wing influencers. Media Trackers discovered the group after filing an open records request concerning a professor and activist at the University of Wisconsin. Members include journalists from outlets like the Huffington Post, MSNBC, ThinkProgress, and Media Matters, and activists from groups like the Progressive Change Campaign Committee, Change.org, Planned Parenthood, and the AFL-CIO. Screen Shot 2014-08-09 at 11.56.11 AM In 2010, Legal Insurrection reported on the first "Journolist," a similar group used to stack the deck against Republicans and conservatives:
For those of you who haven’t been here long, the JournoList was an email list serve organized prior to the 2008 election by Ezra Klein, now one of the lead writers at The Washington Post, in which various young bucks (uh oh, is that a dog whistle) and doe in the emerging melding of blogging and journalism traded various strategies.

Posted by William A. Jacobson on August 07, 2014 3 Comments
One of the enduring claims related to the Gaza war is that pushed by New York Magazine author Katie Zavadski in a viral article originally titled: "It Turns Out Hamas Didn’t Kidnap and Kill 3 Israeli Teens After All (link goes to updated version, not original)(screenshot via Seth Frantzman): https://twitter.com/sfrantzman/status/494216021016723457/photo/1 That claim gave rise to the meme that Israel had concocted a Hamas connection to the kidnapping and murder of three Israeli teens in order to start the Gaza war.  At most, the story went, the kidnapping was carried out by a "lone cell" and thus could not be blamed on Hamas. The claim, however, is falling apart both because it wasn't backed up by facts and because Israel recently revealed that it had arrested the Hamas mastermind, and that there was a definite connection to Hamas.  For background, read these two posts: Today more information was released which further undermines the NY Magazine story, Hamas West Bank head arrested, indicted for planning wave of terror attacks:

Posted by William A. Jacobson on August 05, 2014 13 Comments
We've been here before. The Jenin Massacre that wasn't. The Pallywood industry of deception. And a Western media that laps it all up without question when hostilities are active, and only in some cases bothers to look back later as the facts come out. In the current Gaza conflict, one of the biggest talking points, repeated endlessly by the media, anti-Israel groups, "human rights" groups, and the U.N., is that only a tiny portion, maybe 15% of deaths, were Palestinian combatants. That numbers game was put into play not by Israel, but by those against Israel. It's morbid to engage in these body counts, but it is the Palestinians and their advocates who put them in issue by claiming that the ratio of civilian to combatant deaths constitutes proof of a war crime. It doesn't, as disproportionate force is more than a number count, but in the public relations realm it matters. Slowly, as in past conflicts (including in Lebanon 2006), that statistic will be revealed to be a lie. That civilian deaths are a result of rockets launched from civilian areas is only part of the story. The Washington Post, to its credit, has two articles at least presenting the possibility that the media has been manipulated. In Reporters grapple with politics, erratic sources in reporting Israeli/Gaza death toll, WaPo examines the questionable civilian-to-combatant statistics used by Palestinians:

Posted by William A. Jacobson on August 01, 2014 5 Comments
There have been reports for years that Hamas uses the main hospital in Gaza, Al-Shifa, as a headquarters. It reportedly has bunkers underneath, and uses the hospital itself. There have been tidbits of media reporting on Hamas' use of Al-Shifa as a de facto headquarters for Hamas leaders, who can be seen in the hallways and offices. But mostly it has been covered up by reporters in Gaza, as I detailed in Media cover-up of Hamas crimes starting to unravel. Tweets have been deleted and articles taken down by reporters for major publications. One Italian reporter who left Gaza blew the whistle on the fact that it was Hamas or Islamic Jihad misfired rockets that cause a large number of deaths in a refugee camps. The victims were transported to Al-Shifa, where another rocket had already hit. A Wall Street Journal reporter tweeted, then deleted, his observation that it was a Hamas rocket that hit the hospital. Once the evidence became clear that Israel was not responsible, the media moved on, as if it never happened. The media has a narrative it wants to tell, and that narrative does not include the deaths, injuries and damage Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and others are causing. Here is a good example of how the media played up an Israeli missile striking near Western reporters:

Posted by William A. Jacobson on July 29, 2014 24 Comments
Yesterday one of the stories thrust into the mainstream media was nearly simultaneous explosions in a Palestinian neighborhood and at al-Shifa hospital. The media immediately took the Hamas line that it was Israeli missiles. Later, the IDF stated that it had not fired on those locations, and that the explosions were misfired Hamas or Islamic Jihad missiles. The media played it as he said, he said. But an Italian journalist has just left Gaza and is telling the truth about what happened now that he needs not fear Hamas retaliation -- Israel was right (h/t Israelly Cool): How many more of the civilian casualties have been cause by Hamas and Islamic rockets that fell short or misfired? Like Israel says happened at a U.N. school and shelter. We likely never will know because Hamas is so fast to cover up the scene and intimidates reporters:
The Times of Israel confirmed several incidents in which journalists were questioned and threatened. These included cases involving photographers who had taken pictures of Hamas operatives in compromising circumstances — gunmen preparing to shoot rockets from within civilian structures, and/or fighting in civilian clothing — and who were then approached by Hamas men, bullied and had their equipment taken away.
CAMERA discovered a Wall Street Journal reporter coming to the same conclusion as the Italian reporters, but then deleting the tweet:

Posted by David Gerstman on July 27, 2014 3 Comments
My father just told me about this song by Peter Himmelman, "Maximum Restraint." Himmelman, in addition to being a singer-songwriter in his own right is also Bob Dylan's son-in-law. In the song, Himmelman mocks calls for Israel to exercise "maximum restraint" in response to rocket attacks. Here's a taste of the lyrics:
They’re shooting grads and quassams, from hospitals, mosques and schools When they photograph their dead and dying Hamas just sits and drools Another photo op to take, take straight to CNN they paint Israel as the aggressor – and then it all begins again When someone comes to kill you In the middle of the night Don’t try to defend yourself Don’t use an ounce of might Just sit there quietly and try hard not to faint As the world calls out for – maximum restraint
Himmelman like his father-in-law is a folk rocker from Minnesota. His defense of Israel and criticism of the world's hypocrisy echoes Dylan's 1980's release "Neighborhood Bully" which included this lyric:
Accessibility by WAH