Pure Reuters; pure propaganda

Reuters is infamous for its fauxtography (fabricated, doctored, or staged photos) intended for propaganda purposes.

Yesterday, the Israeli air force killed a Hamas operative and a member of Palestinian President Abbas' al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades.  Here are the pertinent details from a Reuters story:

(Reuters) - An Israeli air strike killed two Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip Thursday and Palestinians in the territory fired rockets deep into southern Israel in the latest round of cross-border violence.In Tel Aviv, an Israeli military spokeswoman confirmed an air strike had been carried out. She said the two men killed in the incident had been planning an attack on Israeli civilians and soldiers along Israel's border with Egypt's Sinai peninsula.  [...]
"(They) were affiliated with a terrorist squad that intended to attack Israeli civilians and soldiers via the western border," an army statement said.
Hamas, an Islamist group sworn to Israel's destruction, has ruled the blockaded Gaza Strip since 2007, while President Mahmoud Abbas's Western-backed Palestinian Authority remains dominant in the occupied West Bank.
The army statement said that Essam had been involved in planning a suicide bombing in the southern Israeli resort of Eilat in 2007 in which three Israeli civilians were killed, and a number of other attacks, some of which had been stopped.
Essam was a member of the al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, an offshoot of Abbas's Fatah movement, group officials said. The Hamas said Sobhi was affiliated with its own armed wing.

Reuters runs a photograph with the story.  Does the news agency show us the wrecked car from the scene?  A file picture of the two Palestinian terrorists?  A photo of damage caused by several of the hundreds of Palestinian rockets fired into Israel this year?  No.  Reuters employs the appeal to pity propaganda technique to suck its audience into sympathy with a mass murderer.

Check it out.

Reuters draws moral equivalence between slaughter of Fogel family and Israeli attempts to identify murderers

A year ago, we would have perhaps begun this post with an expression of dismay in response to the zeal with which Reuters correspondents seek to demonize Israel and the deeply dishonest manner in which they go about it.  No longer.  After covering nearly 600 Reuters stories on the Middle East conflict and documenting the agency's compulsive contempt for truth and decency, nothing surprises us anymore.

So it is with a story written by Reuters correspondent Mohammed Assadi and edited by Jerusalem Bureau Chief Crispian Balmer on Israel's ongoing investigation into the murder of the Fogel family on March 11th.

Assadi, a proven liar and patent propagandist for the Palestinian Arabs, and Balmer, who could not bring himself to characterize the recent Jerusalem bus bombing as terrorism (though even the Palestinian Prime Minister described it as such), attempt to draw a moral equivalence between the unspeakable butchering of the Fogel family and attempts to discover the identity of the murderers.

(Reuters) - Israeli troops briefly detained about 100 women in the West Bank early on Thursday as part of an ongoing investigation into the murder last month of a young Jewish settler family, locals said.  The women, many of them seized with their husbands, were released after police took their fingerprints and DNA samples [...]

Israeli officials blamed Palestinians for the murders. No Palestinian group had claimed responsibility and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas has described the killing as inhumane.
Israeli investigators have repeatedly descended on Awarta since the killing and the head of the village council, Qais Awwad, said troops entered houses overnight, taking away women aged between 20 to 80 in armored trucks to a detention center.

Actually, Fatah's al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigade was reported, by both the Washington Post and The Guardian, to have taken responsibility for the attack.

But the despicable journalistic chicanery in this story, which reflects Assadi and Balmer's lack of professional integrity as well as their irrationality, centers on the employ of a quote from one of the Palestinian women taken in for fingerprinting:

Sumayyah Shurrab, 30, said she had to take her 11-month old child with her. After fingerprint and DNA checks she was taken back to Awarta.
"They told me they wanted to compare them with finger prints they found in the settlement," she said.
"This was a very inhuman act," she added.

Got that? The fingerprinting and DNA check of a suspect in the mass murder of a family is an "inhuman act".  Whereas the mass murder itself is... er, according to Reuters citing of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, merely "inhumane".

But it gets worse.  Abbas didn't say the murders were "inhumane".  He said they were "inhuman":

“This act was abominable, inhuman and immoral,” Mr. Abbas said in a rare interview with Israel Radio that was conducted in Arabic.

So Reuters has deliberately misquoted the Palestinian President in order to minimize the universally-recognized barbaric nature of the crime while featuring a quote from a suspect to suggest that it is the investigative practices that are actually barbaric.

A truly Orwellian inversion brought to you by the immoral media company more Palestinian than the Palestinians.

Breaking

A family of five Israeli Jews including an eleven-year-old child, a toddler, and a one-month-old infant were stabbed to death early this morning.   Fatah's "military wing", al Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, took responsibility for the killings.  One of our colleagues found the following crumpled-up draft in the trash bin behind Reuters Jerusalem Bureau offices:

(Reuters) - 5 Israeli Settlers Found Dead in Occupied West Bank

Five Israeli settlers, including a settler toddler and settler infant living in a settler home built on occupied Palestinian land, were found dead early this morning by the Israeli occupation authorities. The settlers apparently died of wounds sustained by a blunt instrument.

Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas expressed his condolences for the settler deaths and said the incident must not be allowed to damage Palestinian interests including the formation of a Palestinian state with Jerusalem as its capital before the end of the year. Abbas also explained that the incident illustrated why it was imprudent for there to be any Jews living in a Palestinian state.

Within hours of the news of the deaths, the human rights group Peace Now published a report containing satellite imagery of the settler house showing it to have been built on land once owned by a Palestinian Arab that had been sold, under conditions of oppressive bargaining, to the deep-pocketed Jewish family. The settler family had no comment.

In a related development, the Palestinian national soccer team lost its first home match on Wednesday but celebrated the symbolic step towards statehood.

UPDATE MARCH 13, 2011: In our depressing satire above, we suggested Reuters might refer to Israeli security forces as the Israeli occupation authorities.  We didn't know at the time that in early versions of its story on the incident, Reuters did indeed refer to the "Israeli occupation forces". 

A link to photos of the murdered family published by Arutz Sheva.  Their website notes:

These photos were released by the family. They have given full permission for their use in order to report on the horrific reality of murdering children and babies in their sleep, "simply because they are Jewish."

WARNING: THESE PHOTOS ARE EXTREMELY GRAPHIC AND NOT INTENDED FOR CHILDREN.

Palestinian Arabs hysterical when Israel defends its people; Reuters provides the bullhorn

If we were betting men, we would have offered odds that following the murder of Rabbi Meir Avshalom Chai by the terrorist group Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades (Fatah) on Thursday, any Israeli retribution would be pounced upon by the Palestinian Arabs as an example of Israel "seeking to torpedo peace talks" and that Reuters would do its part to broadcast this notion. Our bet would have paid off handsomely.

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:

"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.

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:

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 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:

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 would explain quite a bit.

Reuters: one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter

Reuters global news editor Stephen Jukes once (in)famously wrote (scroll down):

We all know that one man's terrorist is another man's freedom fighter and that Reuters upholds the principle that we do not use the word terrorist.

A long-standing complaint against Reuters is that the news agency refuses to characterize violent attacks aimed at civilians as terrorism or that the word "terrorist" may appear in a story but only in scare quotes.  Reuters can also occasionally be caught characterizing as terrorists some groups which target civilians and not others, depending we suppose, on whether in the view of the writer, the group's political aims are palatable.

For example, in a story from May of this year about civilians fleeing the fighting between the Sri Lankan army and the Tamil Tigers, Reuters correspondent C. Bryson Hull writes:

Sri Lanka again ruled out any truce and said troops were only using small arms while trying to free civilians. It applauded the council's recognition of its right to combat terrorism on its own soil... The Tigers, on U.S., EU, Canadian and Indian terrorist lists, have vowed no surrender in their fight for a separate nation for Sri Lankan minority Tamils, which began in the 1970s and erupted into full-scale civil war in 1983.

Note the use of the words terrorism and terrorist sans quotation marks and the specific mention of listing of the Tigers as a terrorist group by the US, EU, Canada and India.

Now compare that treatment with this:

Hai was the first Israeli fatality in a Palestinian militant attack in the West Bank since April,

excerpted from a Reuters story today about the shooting death of Meir Avshalom Hai while driving his car near Nablus.

Reuters correspondents Nidal al-Mughrabi and Ori Lewis not only fastidiously exclude use of any variation of the word terrorist, but fail also to explain to readers that the Al-Aqsa Martyrs Brigades, which took credit for the attack, is similarly designated as a terrorist group by the US, EU, and Canada.

We think a refresher course on the Reuters Handbook of Journalism is in order:

Reuters would not be Reuters without freedom from bias. We are a “stateless” news service that welcomes diversity into our newsrooms but asks all staff to park their nationality and politics at the door. This neutrality is a hallmark of our news brand and allows us to work on all sides of an issue, conflict or dispute without any agenda other than accurate, fair reporting.