Ismail Haneyya has now proclaimed that the ‘Palestinian people’ came out of the Cloud Pillar with military, political, and media victories over the Israel, stating
the Palestinian media defeated the “Zionist media”,
and he stressed the pro-Palestinian media’s ability to highlight the suffering of the Palestinian people.
“Highlight”? Cheat rather.
There is a Glorida State University professor, one James F. Tracy, who writes a post Gaza: When Propaganda Masquarades as News but he was not at all referring to the Arab campaign to subvert the truth.
That campaign was well oiled and quite successful due to a combination of factors including gross ignorance, naiveté, ideological bias and the occasional anti-Semitism.
If you want to read how really bad some media outlets could be, one could start here at Camera’s Snapshot blog. Thanks to Elder of Ziyon that baby-kissing story was, well, iron-domed. And there are many bloggers in the trenches.
But before one turns a page, something else pops up like the New York Times’ David Carr publishing that Israel was “Using War as Cover to Target Journalists”. In another words, premeditated murder, I conclude. (Here’s a response.)
Of course, we all remember the picture of the Lebanese infant with the bandages arms from August 1982 that upset even an American President. But it was faked even then. And photojournalists continue to be led through the lenses from that war to the intifadas to the Second Lebanon War, to Grapes of Wrath, to Cast Lead and to pillorying Israel during this latest Pillar of Defense cloud.
And try as hard as we do, whether independent bloggers out there as guerrilla troops battling for truth and ethics, whether the IDF’s recent supreme social media effort and on to media NGOs, the corrupt journalistic practices carry on.
Can anything effective be done?
There are three areas in which thought and planning could be invested, hopefully with cooperation and coordination.
First, any and all legal avenues need to be explored. Whether libel laws or others are being violated, an investigation as to judicial options should be conducted.
Second, I would like to see if a play could be written, to creatively deal with the malicious attacks. Ben Hecht’s Front Page is an example of what could be done.
And third, journalists based here could be presented with a handbook “How to Avoid Being Duped by Arab Propaganda”. A dozen or so of the best (aka the worst) examples could be reproduced and then each one analyzed in a structured fashion such as
a. the claim that Arabs wish the journalist to believe
b. the doubts that should have arisen for any objective professional based on readily available information
c. the facts
d. how to avoid reproducing (and especially to refrain from over-enthusiastic tweeting)
And it will be web published for those who perhaps wouldn''t want to accept it.
That''s but a start. We need to push back.
It can’t be that intelligent people of the media are so far gone that once things.
Or are they?
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