Israel is a tiny country, smaller than San Bernardino County, California and less populous than New Jersey--but Israel receives a disproportionate amount of media coverage relative to her size and population and that media coverage is very distorted. Former AP writer Matti Friedman (no relation to this author) explains how and why reporters get Israel so wrong, and why it matters:
While global mania about Israeli actions has
come to be taken for granted, it is actually the result of decisions
made by individual human beings in positions of responsibility--in this
case, journalists and editors. The world is not responding to events in
this country, but rather to the description of these events by news
organizations. The key to understanding the strange nature of the
response is thus to be found in the practice of journalism, and
specifically in a severe malfunction that is occurring in that
profession--my profession--here in Israel.
The world is full of big countries with big problems. There are major wars, huge refugee crises and heartbreaking humanitarian disasters that are largely ignored because the mainstream media is obsessively focused on not just covering Israel but portraying Israel in a negative light. Friedman learned about this process firsthand:
Staffing is the best measure of the
importance of a story to a particular news organization. When I was a
correspondent at the AP, the agency had more than 40 staffers covering
Israel and the Palestinian territories. That was significantly more news
staff than the AP had in China, Russia, or India, or in all of the 50
countries of sub-Saharan Africa combined. It was higher than the total
number of news-gathering employees in all the countries where the
uprisings of the “Arab Spring” eventually erupted.
To offer a sense of scale: Before the outbreak of the civil war in
Syria, the permanent AP presence in that country consisted of a single
regime-approved stringer. The AP’s editors believed, that is, that
Syria’s importance was less than one-40th that of Israel. I don’t mean
to pick on the AP--the agency is wholly average, which makes it useful as
an example. The big players in the news business practice groupthink,
and these staffing arrangements were reflected across the herd. Staffing
levels in Israel have decreased somewhat since the Arab uprisings
began, but remain high. And when Israel flares up, as it did this
summer, reporters are often moved from deadlier conflicts. Israel still
trumps nearly everything else.
The volume of press coverage that results, even when little is going
on, gives this conflict a prominence compared to which its actual human
toll is absurdly small. In all of 2013, for example, the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict claimed 42 lives--that is, roughly the
monthly homicide rate in the city of Chicago. Jerusalem, internationally
renowned as a city of conflict, had slightly fewer violent deaths per
capita last year than Portland, Ore., one of America’s safer cities. In
contrast, in three years the Syrian conflict has claimed an estimated
190,000 lives, or about 70,000 more than the number of people who have
ever died in the Arab-Israeli conflict since it began a century ago.
News organizations have nonetheless decided that this conflict is more important than, for example, the more than 1,600 women murdered in Pakistan last year (271 after being raped and 193 of them burned alive), the ongoing erasure of Tibet by the Chinese Communist Party, the carnage in Congo (more than 5 million dead as of 2012) or the Central African Republic, and the drug wars in Mexico (death toll between 2006 and 2012: 60,000), let alone conflicts no one has ever heard of in obscure corners of India or Thailand. They believe Israel to be the most important story on earth, or very close.
While there is a laser focus on Israel, Friedman notes that the depravity and depredations of Hamas are ignored:
There has been much discussion recently of
Hamas attempts to intimidate reporters. Any veteran of the press corps
here knows the intimidation is real, and I saw it in action myself as an
editor on the AP news desk. During the 2008-2009 Gaza fighting I
personally erased a key detail--that Hamas fighters were dressed as
civilians and being counted as civilians in the death toll--because of a
threat to our reporter in Gaza. (The policy was then, and remains, not
to inform readers that the story is censored unless the censorship is
Israeli. Earlier this month, the AP’s Jerusalem news editor reported and
submitted a story on Hamas intimidation; the story was shunted into
deep freeze by his superiors and has not been published.)
But if critics imagine that journalists are clamoring to cover Hamas
and are stymied by thugs and threats, it is generally not so. There are
many low-risk ways to report Hamas actions, if the will is there: under
bylines from Israel, under no byline, by citing Israeli sources.
Reporters are resourceful when they want to be.
The fact is that Hamas intimidation is largely beside the point
because the actions of Palestinians are beside the point: Most reporters
in Gaza believe their job is to document violence directed by Israel at
Palestinian civilians. That is the essence of the Israel story. In
addition, reporters are under deadline and often at risk, and many don’t
speak the language and have only the most tenuous grip on what is going
on. They are dependent on Palestinian colleagues and fixers who either
fear Hamas, support Hamas, or both. Reporters don’t need Hamas enforcers
to shoo them away from facts that muddy the simple story they have been
sent to tell.
It is not coincidence that the few journalists who have documented
Hamas fighters and rocket launches in civilian areas this summer were
generally not, as you might expect, from the large news organizations
with big and permanent Gaza operations. They were mostly scrappy,
peripheral, and newly arrived players--a Finn, an Indian crew, a few others. These poor souls didn’t get the memo.
Why should you care that the mainstream media slanders Israel, panders to Hamas and feels free to distort the truth in order to advance a particular political ideology? In the words of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., "All men are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a
single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly affects all
indirectly. I can never be what I ought to be until you are what you
ought to be and you can never be what you ought to be until I am what I
ought to be." The price of the media's war against Israel is not paid just by Israelis but also by all of the downtrodden people of the world who are crying out in despair for someone to tell their stories.
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All contents Copyright (c) 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, 2016, 2017, 2018, 2019, 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023, 2024 David Friedman. All rights reserved.
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