In an overnight raid, the Israeli Defense Forces killed three members of the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades suspected of involvement in the attack on Chai. Within hours, Reuters had assembled a story of over 500 words complete with a photo of the mobbed funerals and the usual hysterical whining from Palestinian officials:
Note that following the killing of Rabbi Chai, Reuters only found ink to run a story of 185 words with a clinical photo of the van Chai was driving and a dry, paraphrased response from Israeli officials:"This grave Israeli escalation shows Israel is not interested in peace and is trying to explode the situation," Nabil Abu Rdainah, a top aide to Abbas, told Reuters.
This raises the interesting question of whether Reuters, like some other media companies, publishes sensationalized stories to sell content. If such were the case, we might expect to see comparable examples following violent incidents on both sides of the conflict which, as demonstrated, does not occur. In this respect, Reuters one-sided emotive reporting appears to be more politically-motivated than commercially-driven. This would be consistent with a story appearing in the Makor Rishon newspaper (Hebrew) on October 25th, 2002 which reported:Gil said the military had been removing checkpoints from West Bank roads to ease travel restrictions on Palestinians, but would consider putting new ones in place if they would prevent similar attacks in the future.
This would explain quite a bit.Last week, a senior person from the Reuters News Agency appeared before a group of Canadian philanthropists from the United Fund. Reuters was created by the British and it reports along the ideological lines and the world view of Great Britain even after the fall of the British Empire.
The representative of Reuters admitted for the first time that Reuters has taken a specific political line whereby the territories of Yesha [the West Bank and Gaza Strip] are considered Palestinian Lands. He admitted also that the Reuters News Agency forbids its reporters to refer to Palestinian terrorists as terrorists, in spite of the fact that such people in other locations merit the term terrorists in Reuters reports.
For example, the perpetrators of the bombing in Bali, Indonesia were defined by Reuters as terrorists. In contrast, the perpetrators of the car bomb this week that blew up the bus at Karkur Junction and that killed 14 Israelis and wounded tens of others were called teenagers. As if a few teenagers executed a little prank.
This is some pretty damning evidence, however the Makor Rishon article would have done better to at least mention the name of this senior official so that 1) the authenticity could actually be verified and 2) this can be presentes as a definitive proof of bias. It is hard to believe that the paper could not find out this speaker's name with so many people present and his supposed high rank, and that omission deminishes both the article's credibility and our ability to use it as an effective means against this bias.
ReplyDeleteThanks for your comment; we agree on all counts. The original article was published seven years ago and our source for it (at the moment) is secondary. We are investigating to see if we can locate additional supporting material.
ReplyDelete