Journalism

American Media’s New Pro-Israel Bias

August 2, 2014 Chris McGreal, www.theguardian.com Educate! Gaza, Israel, Journalism, Mass Media, Palestine

In years of reporting from and about Israel, I’ve followed the frequently robust debate in its press about whether Netanyahu really wants a peace deal, about the growing power of right-wing members inside the Israeli cabinet opposed to a Palestinian state, about the creeping air of permanence to the occupation. So it has been all the more striking to discover a far narrower discourse in Washington and the notoriously pro-Israel mainstream media in the US at a time when difficult questions are more important than ever. John Kerry, the US secretary of state, and a crop of foreign leaders have ratcheted up warnings that the door for the two-state solution is closing, in no small part because of Israel’s actions. But still the difficult questions go unasked. Take Netanyahu’s appearance on CBS’s Face the Nation on Sunday. The host, Bob Schieffer, permitted the Israeli leader to make a lengthy case for the his military’s ground attack, guiding him along with one sympathetic question after another. Finally, after describing Netanyahu’s position as “very understandable”, Schieffer asked about dead Palestinian civilians – but only to wonder if they presented a public relations problem in “the battle for world opinion”. As if Schieffer’s position wasn’t already blindingly clear, he went on to quote former prime minister Golda Meir’s line that Israelis can never forgive Arabs “for forcing us to kill their children”.

Boycotting Israel: We Can Protect Gaza

August 2, 2014 Yara Hawari, www.pacbi.org Organize! boycott, Israel, Journalism, Palestine

Israel has lost its grip on reality. The death toll in Gaza stands at well over a thousand and continues to rise by the day. The coastal strip has been reduced to rubble. Rather than celebrating Eid this week, Palestinians in Gaza have been burying their dead. Jon Snow’s poignant message after his return from Gaza on Channel 4 news was heart-breaking. He had been reporting from Al Shifa hospital where he saw many horrific injuries and scores of dead children. He ended his report with this plea to the public: “If our reporting is worth anything, if your preparedness to listen and watch and read is anything to go by, then together we can make a difference." This latest massacre of Palestinians has been well documented, with every death recorded and every bombing filmed. Although this has yet to deter Israel, it is still important to keep documenting this assault so that its victims do not fall into the chasms of history. But individuals in the international community need to go further than this. They need to boycott Israel. It might be the only thing that ends the impunity that is allowing them to repeatedly assault Palestinian human rights.

White House Emails Torture Report Talking Points

July 31, 2014 Xeni Jardin, www.boingboing.net Educate! Journalism, Prison, Torture, White House

A White House staff member 'accidentally emailed' non-classified talking points about a classified torture report to an Associated Press reporter. The document says a Senate report concludes the CIA initially withheld information about torture and secret prisons from then-Secretary of State Colin Powell and others. A Senate report on the CIA’s interrogation and detention practices after the 9/11 attacks concludes that the agency initially kept the secretary of state and some U.S. ambassadors in the dark about harsh techniques and secret prisons, according to a document circulating among White House staff. The still-classified report also says some ambassadors who were informed about interrogations of al-Qaida detainees at so-called black sites in their countries were instructed not to tell their superiors at the State Department, says the document, which the White House accidentally emailed to an Associated Press reporter. Read the full AP item: "Powell maybe not told early about CIA techniques"

US-Supported Firing Missiles In Ukraine?

July 30, 2014 Lauren McCauley, www.commondreams.org Educate! Journalism, Mass Media, Russia, Ukraine, US

One day after the U.S. government accused Russia of betraying a signature treaty by test-firing a medium-range ballistic missile, questions are mounting on Tuesday over whether the Ukrainian Army has actually fired short-range ballistic missiles at rebel-held areas in the east of the country. [A U.S. official] said it is not clear if the United States will show satellite imagery of the Ukrainian firings "because these are the good guys." —CNN reportWith no mention of potential civilian casualties, CNN reported on Tuesday that according to three U.S. officials, in the past 48 hours the Ukrainian military had fired several short-range ballistic missiles "into areas controlled by Russian separatists." CNN reports: One U.S. official said so far, there has been no reaction from Russia. A second official said it is not clear if the United States will show satellite imagery of the Ukrainian firings "because these are the good guys." Another of the U.S. officials called the firings "an escalation, but Ukraine has a right to defend itself." So far, the Ukrainian government has not publicly acknowledged the missile firings. CNN is seeking a comment from Kiev. While U.S. officials say they don't think pro-Russian rebels have used ballistic missiles, they remain concerned about how Russia might respond.

Palestinian Protesters Occupy BBC Bristol’s Front Lawn

July 29, 2014 Christopher Brown, www.bristol247.com Resist! Israel, Journalism, Media, Palestine, Protest, Violence

Palestinian supporters set up an ‘Occupy’ style protest camp on the lawn of the BBC in Bristol this week. The campaign group calling itself “Bristol Friends of Gaza” occupied the front lawn in front of the BBC headquarters on Whiteladies Road, unveiling a 50ft-long banner. The group declared they would occupy the area “until the BBC tells the real truth on Palestine”. Pro-Palestinian protesters have been out in force this week, as the Israeli army launch a new offensive in the Gaza Strip. On Saturday, hundreds of people marched through Bristol to highlight the cause. On Tuesday meanwhile, there were protests at City Hall at the same time as a protest against residents parking zones in the city, which was largely good-natured despite a scuffle on a tank used by the RPZ protesters to draw attention to their cause. Last night, at least two Palestinians were killed and 200 wounded in the West Bank during protests against Israel’s campaign in Gaza.

MSNBC Plunged Into New Controversy Over Its Israel-Palestine Coverage

July 25, 2014 Jack Mirkinson, www.huffingtonpost.com Educate! Gaza, Israel, Journalism, Mass Media, Palestine

The MSNBC contributor who tore into the channel's coverage of Israel and Palestine returned to the airwaves on Tuesday night, only to find herself in a new controversy about her status at the network. Rula Jebreal's contention that MSNBC was "disgustingly biased" towards Israel went viral on Monday and Tuesday, especially after she tweeted that her subsequent appearances on the network had been canceled. Jebreal was then booked on "All In," where she had a very contentious discussion with host Chris Hayes about MSNBC and the media in general. Hayes asserted that MSNBC was doing a better job than most in covering the conflict in a balanced way. Jebreal heatedly argued that the network was still heavily tilted in favor of Israeli guests and Israeli perspectives. The really interesting, though, was how MSNBC chose to describe Jebreal. During her Monday appearance, she was labeled an "MSNBC contributor." But, as observers on social media noticed, "All In" dubbed her a "Palestinian journalist". This caused media watchers to wonder whether MSNBC had severed its ties with Jebreal following her criticism. Speaking to "Democracy Now," Jebreal said her status with the network was unclear. "I have no idea [if I've been fired]," she said. "I still don’t know. My contract is up, and we’re negotiating still."

EPA Non-Responsive On Texas Air Pollution

July 25, 2014 Lisa Song and Jim Morris, www.insideclimatenews.org Organize! EPA, Journalism, pollution, Texas

For more than a year, InsideClimate News and the Center for Public Integrity have been reporting on air pollution caused by the fracking boom in the Eagle Ford Shale of South Texas. Despite hundreds of complaints from residents, many of them about noxious air emissions, we discovered that the state knows almost nothing about the extent of the pollution and rarely fines companies for breaking emission laws. On our 11 trips to Texas we encountered many residents who asked what seemed to be a reasonable question: If a state regulatory agency—in this case the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality—isn't doing much to curb the industry's air pollution, why isn't the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency stepping in? The EPA, after all, is ultimately responsible for enforcing the federal Clean Air Act. In February, after we published our first stories on the Eagle Ford, we began trying to answer that question by seeking on-the-record interviews with EPA officials in Washington, D.C., and Texas. Five months later, no such interviews have been granted. Instead, EPA press officers have told us to put our questions in writing, an increasingly common response from federal agencies under the Obama administration. The process usually goes like this: A journalist calls the press office to schedule an interview but instead is told to submit written questions. Once these are in, a press officer gets answers from scientists or other officials and then crafts a written response. In most cases, nobody involved in the process—not even the EPA press officers—will agree to be quoted by name.

CNN Reporter Removed From Israel-Gaza After Scum Tweet

July 19, 2014 Michael Calderone, www.huffingtonpost.com Educate! CNN, Gaza, Israel, Journalism

CNN has removed correspondent Diana Magnay from covering the Israeli-Palestinian conflict after she tweeted that Israelis who were cheering the bombing of Gaza, and who had allegedly threatened her, were “scum.” “After being threatened and harassed before and during a liveshot, Diana reacted angrily on Twitter,” a CNN spokeswoman said in a statement to The Huffington Post. “She deeply regrets the language used, which was aimed directly at those who had been targeting our crew," the spokeswoman continued. "She certainly meant no offense to anyone beyond that group, and she and CNN apologize for any offense that may have been taken.” The spokeswoman said Magnay has been assigned to Moscow. Magnay appeared on CNN Thursday from a hill overlooking the Israel-Gaza border. While she reported, Israelis could be heard near her cheering as missiles were fired at Gaza. After the liveshot, Magnay tweeted: “Israelis on hill above Sderot cheer as bombs land on #gaza; threaten to ‘destroy our car if I say a word wrong’. Scum.” The tweet was quickly removed, but not before it had been retweeted more than 200 times. The removal of Magnay comes a day after NBC News pulled Ayman Mohyeldin from Gaza.

NY Times Rewrites Headline On 4 Gaza Boys Killed By Israel

July 18, 2014 Peter Hart, www.fair.org Educate! Gaza, Israel, Journalism, Middle East, New York Times (NYT), Palestine, Wars and Militarism

Yesterday (7/16/14) the New York Times posted its first account of the Israeli strike that killed four young Palestinians on a beach in Gaza. The headline looked like this: "Four Young Boys Killed Playing On Gaza Beach." That headline appropriately conveys the horrors witnessed and documented by the Times reporters. But at some point–around 9:00 pm, according to the website Newsdiffs–the headline was changed to the version that appears on the front page of the New York Times today: "Boys Drawn to Gaza Beach, and Into Center of Mideast Strife." Was there something wrong with noting in the headline that the boys were killed? Do readers learn more being told they were "drawn into strife"? Headlines are one very prominent way that news stories are framed. In this case, it does a disservice to the reporting underneath.

NBC Pulls Its Best Journalist from Gaza Just as Israel Invades

July 18, 2014 Phyllis Bennis, www.fpif.org Educate! Israel, Journalism, Mass Media, Palestine, Wars and Militarism

News of the long-anticipated ground attack on Gaza has just broken. Israeli troops have invaded northern Gaza, vowing to protect Israelis and destroy Hamas—regardless of the human costs to Palestinian civilians. El Wafa Rehabilitation Hospital, the only rehab center in Gaza, has been destroyed by Israeli bombs. Four more small children were killed by an airstrike in eastern Gaza City. Israeli tanks are on the move into the Strip. And now, with the war threatening to spin out of control, the U.S. public has lost one of its most trustworthy reporters in the embattled Gaza Strip. Citing transparently disingenuous “security concerns,” NBC has decided to remove Ayman Mohyeldin—who has been reporting from Gaza for years—from his post and ordered him to leave Gaza immediately. Mohyeldin’s coverage has been even-handed, careful, and comprehensive. His coverage of one of the most recent of the many horror stories of the current war against Gaza was a model for what journalism should look like. On July 16, carefully targeted Israeli strikes killed four little boys on the Gaza beach. Cousins from the Bakr family, and inseparable, the boys were 9-year-old Ismael, 10-year-olds Ahed and Zakaria, and 11-year-old Mohamed. They were playing on the beach, in front of the Gaza hotel where most foreign journalists are staying.

Swedish Court Upholds Detention Order On Julian Assange

July 18, 2014 Karl Ritter, www.ctvnews.ca Resist! Journalism, Julian Assange, Law, Sweden, Wikileaks

A Swedish court on Wednesday upheld its detention order on Julian Assange, reaffirming the legal basis for an international warrant for the WikiLeaks founder which has kept him hiding in the Ecuadorean Embassy in London for two years. Assange's defence team said it would appeal. Defence lawyer Per Samuelson said they would study the judge's decision in detail and then "write a juicy, toxic appeal" to a higher court. Julian Assange's lawyer Tomas Olsson, centre, talks to media prior to a public court hearing in Stockholm on Wednesday July 16, 2014. (AP / Roger Vikstrom) "Our legal arguments are solid and powerful," Samuelson told The Associated Press. "That they didn't work could be because the judge didn't give herself enough time to think." Last month, Assange's lawyers filed a court petition to repeal the detention order -- imposed by the Stockholm district court in November 2010 -- on the grounds that it cannot be enforced while he is at the embassy and because it is restricting Assange's civil rights. Assange has not been formally indicted in Sweden, but he is wanted for questioning by police over allegations of sexual misconduct and rape involving two women he met during a visit to the Scandinavian country in 2010. He denies the allegations.

NY Times Pro-War Bias Still Evident

July 14, 2014 Robert Parry, www.consortiumnews.com Educate! Iraq, Journalism, Mass Media, Syria, Ukraine

Exclusive: Mistakes were made on the Iraq War in 2003 and lessons have been learned, the New York Times says, but those lessons haven’t carried over to the Times’ deeply biased coverage of the crises in Syria and Ukraine, reports Robert Parry. The New York Times’ public editor Margaret Sullivan acknowledges that the newspaper’s coverage of Iraq before President George W. Bush’s 2003 invasion “was flawed, driven by outside agendas and lacking in needed skepticism.” But she says lessons were learned. “Many Op-Ed columns and Times editorials promoted the idea of a war that turned out to be both unfounded and disastrous,” Sullivan wrote on June 29, adding that, in retrospect, the coverage “was the cause of much soul-searching for The Times” and that those lessons now are at the forefront of the Times’ handling of the new crisis in Iraq. However, the real question isn’t whether the Times will make the same mistakes in flacking for an Iraq War sequel. As Sullivan noted, President Barack Obama – unlike his neocon predecessor – remains resistant to dispatching U.S. combat forces to Iraq.

ABC Admits Error But Doesn’t Correct Bias

July 12, 2014 Peter Hart, www.fair.org Educate! Israel, Journalism, Mass Media, Palestine

On July 8, ABC World News anchor Diane Sawyer gave viewers the latest on the violence in the Gaza Strip–by stressing the threat to Israel: We take you overseas now to the rockets raining down on Israel…. And here an Israeli family trying to salvage what they can, one woman standing speechless among the ruins. One problem: Neither of those images is an "Israeli family." Both photos are from the Gaza Strip, and capture the aftermath of Israeli attacks. I pointed this out to ABC World News on Twitter yesterday: .@ABCWorldNews Your anchor misidentified a photo of people suffering in Gaza as "an Israeli family." Correction? http://t.co/nEGygbIRHj — Peter Hart (@peterfhart) July 9, 2014 Thankfully, many others caught the same newscast, including Yousef Munayyer of the Palestine Center, which posted a video of ABC's embarrassing mistake. Journalist Rania Khalek wrote a piece for the Electronic Intifada (7/9/14) as well. So an honest mistake, right? That's one way of looking at it. But there's a pretty well-established pattern of corporate media trying to paint the conflict as between equals, a type of false balance that treats the threats to Israeli lives and Palestinians lives as similar.

The US Media Cannot Be Trusted On Israel-Palestine

July 11, 2014 Charlotte Silver, www.aljazeera.com Educate! Israel, Journalism, Mass Media, Palestine

Since Israel's brutal 21-day assault on Gaza in the winter of '08-'09 (dubbed by Israeli politicians as Operation Cast Lead) that led to over 1,400 Palestinian deaths - of which 930 were civilians including many women and children - followed by its deadly raid on a civilian Turkish ship headed to Gaza in June 2010 that resulted in nine casualties and dozens injured, many Palestinians as well as their advocates in the West have spoken of a significant "sea change" in the western media's once hegemonic support for Israel. However, since this latest military operation began - already claiming more than 30 lives and injuring hundreds - evidence of any changing tide has been scant. The New York Times and the BBC have always been reliable mouthpieces for Israel's line of justification for bombarding Palestinians, and they have not failed the Zionist state in this instance. However, their so-called liberal counterparts have scarcely hit a different tone.

At The Heart Of An Occupation And Beyond

July 1, 2014 Nathan Schneider, www.attheheartofanoccupation.blogspot.com Educate! Civil Rights, Democracy, Journalism, Occupy

I was drawn in initially before it existed by the idea that something like this might happen. In the summer of 2011, I was meeting with activists from around the world who were involved with different manifestations of global uprising that year, and I started wondering whether people were planning something like that in the United States. I started looking for planning processes. First, I found the group that was planning to occupy Freedom Plaza in Washington DC. I went to one of their meetings, and it was through that that I learned about this group planning to occupy Wall Street. That was late July or early August. Out of curiosity and a desire to see the process of people trying to figure out what joining this global movement might mean in the United States, I went to my first meeting on August 10th, 2011. I had been covering activism in New York for a few years. I didn’t recognize anyone, which was really exciting. They were younger than a lot of the people that I’d been following around and getting to know. There was a sense of possibility that I had never felt before in that group, while also a sense of chaos and madness in good ways and sometimes in frustrating ways. I went as a reporter looking to cover this, and the first thing that happened when I arrived was having to present myself as a reporter and having a debate ensue about that. By the time the occupation began, I had felt a sense of connection with this community beyond the kind of normal reporter relationship.

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