Tuvia Grossman does not remember much of what happened after he collapsed into
the arms of a border policeman on September 30, 2000. Bleeding from severe blows
to the head and being chased by an angry Palestinian mob in east Jerusalem, all
the then-yeshiva student from Chicago remembers is waking up in an ambulance on
the way to the hospital.
“I was being beaten by the mob, but I managed to
yell for a second and they backed up, allowing me to run away. I ran over a hill
and saw a border policeman coming towards me... I had lost so much blood that
when I reached him, I just fell to the floor unconscious,” recalls Grossman of
the traumatic attack, one of the first of the second intifada.
While the
border policeman, later identified as Gidon Tzefadi, a Druse from Kafr Sumei,
managed to get Grossman into an ambulance and essentially saved his life, a
nearby Associated Press photographer gave this dramatic escape and rescue a
totally different spin.
The next day, plastered across newspapers around
the world -- most notably
The New York Times – was an emotive photograph of
Grossman covered in blood with Tzefadi in the background wielding a club. The
caption read: “An Israeli policeman and a Palestinian on the Temple
Mount.”
The clearly mislabeled photograph, which appeared to highlight
Israeli brutality toward Palestinians, was hastily retracted by the Times after
Grossman’s parents in Chicago had the unfortunate experience of seeing their
son’s bloody image in the newspaper and immediately contacted it to
complain.
However, laments Grossman, who made aliya six years ago and now
works as a lawyer in Tel Aviv, “it was already too late, the damage had been
done.”
“Angry and upset are not words I would use to describe it,” he
says. “It’s more frustration that despite the fact you are the center of a
picture everyone is talking about, the photo is clearly wrong, but no one cares
and you can’t change it.
“I had just gone through this horrible attack, I
had suffered because I was a Jew living in Israel and the photo seemed to show
the very opposite of what I believe in.”
However, while the image was
adopted by some as a symbol of Israeli brutality – Grossman claims it still can
be found today on an Egyptian Web site advocating the Palestinian cause – the
gross distortion led directly to the establishment of the now Israel-based media
watchdog organization, HonestReporting.com.
Over the past decade,
the nonprofit organization, which started in the UK as a simple e-mail list, has
found itself at the forefront of exposing other problematic images of Israel
that have continued to appear in the international media.
Honest
Reporting managing editor Simon Plosker, a veteran British immigrant, reels off
a list of other cases in which the international media wittingly or unwittingly
published photographs that on some level misrepresent the so-called facts of the
Israeli- Palestinian conflict.
He discusses the Photoshopped images of a
bomb exploding over Beirut published by Reuters during the Second Lebanon War,
photos from the Gaza conflict of 2008/09 reused in the past few months by the
Daily Telegraph to show present day life in the Strip and, more recently,
cropped photographs disseminated by Reuters that “removed” a dagger held by an
activist over a wounded IDF soldier during the
Mavi Marmara incident. In all
cases, those involved in publishing the erroneous images willingly admitted
their mistakes.
“There are many reasons these distortions could happen,”
explains Plosker. “Perhaps the photographer had an agenda, or maybe it happened
in the editorial offices – a naïve or misinformed photo editor perhaps?”
Whatever the reason, he says: “Our main goal at Honest Reporting is to make
people aware that what they see is not always the truth. I admit we are a pro-
Israel organization, but that does not conflict with holding the media
accountable and demanding that they adopt professional standards.”
ONE OF
the ways Honest Reporting achieves this is by scrutinizing the international
media from every angle.
Recently it completed a three-month study
examining images published by wire services based in the region.
The
yet-to-be-published study, which was exclusively obtained for this story by
The
Jerusalem Post, reveals an alarming increase in distorted images unfavorable to
Israel. Many were Photoshopped or cropped; some were revealed to have been
staged either by a distorted camera angle or by journalists making themselves
part of the photo by “antagonizing security forces,” says Plosker.
“We
also noted numerous captions that had been editorialized or completely
distorted,” he continues, adding, however, that what was most worrying was the
sheer volume of photos coming out of Israel compared to other places in the
Middle East.
“There were many more images coming from the
Israeli-Palestinian conflict compared to, for example, the Afghanistan or Iraq
conflicts,” Plosker points out.
“It’s a well-known fact that Israel is
covered more disproportionately by the international media than any other
region,” comments Miri Eisen, a former prime ministerial media adviser, adding
that distorting photographs especially in conflict zones is “nothing
new.”
“It was around in World War II and it is part of the tools that
both sides use during a war,” she says dryly, suggesting that it is not
necessarily aimed specifically at Israel but rather a nuance of media reporting
where “most of the news is negative.”
Unfortunately, adds Eisen, the
Palestinian- Israel conflict is never seen in a good light for either
side.
Despite photographic manipulation and unbalanced or negative
reporting being an old element of news coverage, the retired army colonel also
notes that in today’s media environment, “it is much easier to doctor a
photograph” and “once it is out there, it can spread rapidly with little control
over where it reaches.”
This factor, admits Eisen, means that the role of
media watchdog groups such as Honest Reporting is even more essential than in
the past.
Due to their work, “people now realize that they cannot believe
everything in the news and even though they still have respect for the
profession of journalism, people now question what they see,” she says.
“Obviously, however, a picture is still worth a thousand words and there is no
doubt that people remember these very powerful images.”
Sadly, Tuvia
Grossman cannot agree more.
“Even though the Times printed a correction,
cousins of mine witnessing a pro-Palestinian rally in Sao Paulo, Brazil noticed
demonstrators holding up posters of me to demonstrate Israeli brutality,” he
quips. “There are always going to be people who saw original and but did not see
correction.”
However, what upsets Grossman even more is that even though
the media willingly admit such mistakes, “they never seem to learn from them.
It’s obviously a recurring problem and no matter how much we expose it, it’s
always going to be there.”