Wednesday, May 26, 2010

More broken boilerplate

In a previous entry, we noted Reuters deliberately downplaying the casus belli and damage done to Israel by Hezbollah in the 2006 war.  In a story today about Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah threatening Israeli shipping, Reuters correspondent Mariam Karouny recycles the broken and biased boilerplate from Reuters earlier article:
Hezbollah fought against Israel in a 34-day war in 2006 after the group captured two Israeli soldiers in a cross-border raid. Some 1,200 people in Lebanon, mostly civilians, were killed and 160 Israelis, mostly soldiers, died.

Israel pounded Beirut's southern suburbs as well as mainly Shi'ite southern Lebanon where Hezbollah maintains a stronghold and from which Israel withdrew in 2000.

Israeli bombing also hit bridges, roads, airport runways, ports, factories, power and water networks, and military installations, and the eastern Bekaa Valley.
We'll paraphrase what we wrote in our previous post:

Reuters report of the war is heavily biased, describing the Israeli attacks in Lebanon in vivid detail while entirely omitting details of the start of the war and havoc in Israel caused by Hezbollah.  For example, Reuters fails to tell readers that:
1) Eight Israeli soldiers were killed by Hezbollah when the other two soldiers were kidnapped;
2) Hezbollah fired Katyusha rockets into Israeli border communities at the time of the initial attack;
3) Thousands of Israeli homes took direct hits by more than 4,000 rockets launched by Hezbollah during the war;
4) 300,000 Israelis were displaced;
5) More than one million Israelis were forced to live in bomb shelters for weeks.
Additionally, note Reuters' asymmetrical use of weasel words when describing Israelis as having "died" in the conflict while Lebanese were "killed".

For a bit of balance, this is what Israelis lived through:

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