Media Reportage Serves to Support Palestinian Terrorism
Recent headlines from mainstream media sources
Wars are not fought exclusively on the battlefield. They are fought and supported through ideology – ideas that flow through society originating from politicians to professors, from powerful interest group to grassroots activists.
But in today’s age, none of these ideas has a chance of competing in our fast-paced marketplace for attention except the ones chosen to be significant by the most important arbiters of the battlefield: the media.
In theory, journalists report the “facts,” roughly recognized as the compilation of the actual happenings of any given event. Subjective distillation is, of course, always a factor, as all journalists are forced by necessity into choosing the most salient points and leaving out what they deem insignificant details.
But to consciously choose to distort the facts or skew the facts in a way that distorts them takes the writer out of the realm of journalism and into that of propaganda. When propaganda bandied about as journalism is used to support terrorists, journalists become the terrorists' “willing executioners” – complicit in bloodshed and murder.
The current terrorist onslaught in Israel has seen some of the worst reportage by the world’s conventional media outlets. Over the past three weeks, Israelis have faced murderous Islamists intent on killing them through a variety of means from knifing, shooting or running them over with vehicles. In the course of these attacks, most of the terrorists have been killed -- by police, soldiers or armed citizens defending themselves.
Yet, the headlines ring out through world declaring
(from the Independent):
(from NPR, with a full-size picture of a relative crying over and kissing the body of a dead terorist):
(from USA Today):
(and from the Irish Independent, simply):
When Palestinians set the Tomb of the Patriarch Joseph, a revered Jewish holy site, ablaze on Saturday night, CNN reported:
CNN later updated to headline to:
Another recent article on CNN actually writes a dual report of the news of the day under the headline:
The dual report was introduced with the following subhead:
Never mind that Palestinian Authority sources, as spearheaded by Mahmoud Abbas, have a history of lying. What CNN was calling “incidents” happened to be three stabbings and two attempted stabbings of Israelis by Palestinians. One can only imagine the same dual reporting of the West’s battle against ISIS -- “incidents” (let's say, beheadings and stonings of civilians) reported from both the West’s perspective and that of ISIS.
For journalists, the Internet has made fact-checking remarkably easy, however, the Internet's advent in the world of news has also been a Catch -22. News must now compete with social media, which can provide up-to-the-minute, first-hand reports. Decreasing revenues combined with rolling deadlines means there are fewer resources available with more pressure to get the story out.
Yet, the reportage of the current terror war against Israel goes beyond all fair journalist standards and excuses. As such, media complicity in terror is another battle all fair-minded people need to fight.
Meira Svirsky is the editor of ClarionProject.org
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