I apologize to my readers when I introduce someone else's piece with a foreword that is often as long as the article itself. But we've been waiting for so long for the mea culpas of the bland and biased American Press that it is tempting to want to voice one's own opinion in parallel.
In the piece below, the Jewish Zionist Sharon Waxman waxes nostalgic about the time when Zionists like her and this Friedman she quotes at length had an absolutely free hand in fitting the entire world into two camps:
The good camp of Israel, Zionist violence, illegal barbarian settlement of Palestinian land, and labeling all Palestinians (and subliminally all Arabs) as terrorists; the camp of the fabricated supremacist Jewish-only country of Israel as a “democracy” (as long as only Jews were participating in it) and in an insult to anyone with a functioning brain, “the only” democracy in the entire Middle East. The camp that ignored the brutal reality of the birth of Israel as a gigantic ethnic cleansing campaign that expelled one people out of its historical land under the Hollywoodian banners of “Exodus”, the “Ten Commandments” and such trash, all targeting a dumb audience of ignorant Americans, all inspired from the dusty biblical fiction of Bronze Age nomads whose brains were fried by the scorching sun into monopolizing the absurd notion of God – the Big Zombie in the Sky – belonging to them, and to them only.
The other camp, needless to say, is that of a raped Palestine and of an underdog Palestinian people without resources expelled from their land and condemned to eternally prove to the world that their raped country is the terrorist nation that fails to ensure the security of its rapist, the modern Jewish Europeans and Americans suddenly adhering to the garbage of a parchemin written and copied thousands of years ago by hundreds of smelly bearded old men from the Bronze Age of humanity.
Yes, Sharon Waxman, these were good times. You ought to feel nostalgic because right now your job has become reality, it has become harder because you actually have to defend your absurd claims and lies. You should feel nostalgic about the time when only a handful of chosen “partisan experts” dispensed their wisdom on the rest of us plebeian goyim who were denied access to the raw data. They had access and chose to amplify their preferred data while omitting other unsavory but true data from their analysis. It always is sad when a century ends and another one begins: Right now, there is a “fin de siècle” feeling in those dusty old offices of prestigious and venerable institutions of the press and the media who, having had an exclusive monopoly over the information and the narratives for so long, now have to share the field with “lowlier” sources that, ironically, now have equal access to the data and, consequently, offer an interpretation of events that is very different from that of the lying sages of the old and stale sources and, worse yet for the latter, is much closer to the truth. A balanced truth, at last.
Yes, Sharon Waxman, the perceptions of Israel have been corrected by the avalanche of long buried historical facts, data and testimonies that the Internet has suddenly dumped into the public square. Unfortunately for misinformers, disinformers and malinformers like you. You have the audacity to claim that the present unrestricted, uncensored availability of all the data favors “fixed narratives and activist journalism over a tradition of fact-based reporting”. Your tradition was fact-based? You sound like an inveterate - and invertebrate - liar who has no exit out of the liar’s den other than to keep lying. You have the gall to declare that the liberation and democratization of information by the Internet and modern media constitute “fixed narratives” and “activist journalism”? Just because it reveals a truth that you long tried to hide?
Americans have always claimed that theirs was “objective” journalism. In the rest of the world, newspapers voice their ideology clearly and say what they think and think what they say. I much prefer to know that I am reading a Communist newspaper than be fooled by a bland American newspaper pretending to be neutral and objective and without ideology as it peddles one-sided custom-tailored trash. In effect, the American press (really advertising rags disguised as newspapers) never says what it stands for. It is more like a cult of prudish puritans who do not dare say what they truly stand for, for fear of appearing biased and losing readership and money. It’s not about the truth; it’s about making money. Every American toilet rag newspaper says the same thing: The silverbacks of the press send a couple of reporters with instructions like "anything but do not hurt the Israeli side". When the “sedated” and properly-censored report is wired back to the home office, the editors make sure the report tells the story as it “should be told” – as the New York Times claims “the news that’s fit to print” – then syndicates it to the entire second- and third-tier local and regional newspapers who blurt it back “as is” to an ignorant and dumb audience who can’t check or audit or vet the information.
Believe me, I’ve lived everywhere in the US and the most important “news” that the Boston Globe, the Providence Journal, the Cincinnati Inquirer, the Milwaukee Sentinel, the Syracuse Post-Standard or their ilk - really advertising rags disguised as newspapers - peddle to their ignorant readership is the coupon section in their Sunday edition. The New York Times – i.e. Yahweh Almighty – said it; it must therefore be true. That was the mantra. And now that this is no longer the case, now that every citizen is a reporter, a journalist and a newspaper, it becomes complicated for you. You now have to compete. You now have to actually do some serious research work before you repeat your asinine and biased bullet points for the umpteenth time. Your information is now checked and its bias frequently corrected by your average citizen who, with a click of a finger, can now research the history, the background, the conflicting narratives and make up his or her mind without your miserable assistance.
Israel is now in a bad shape because the full unadulterated un-omitted uncensored truth is out. Yes, it is a lot more complicated world for Ms. Waxman when radically different versions of a story come out that are at odds with her previously unchallenged version. And that is why she is nostalgic of that long bygone era.
If, as you claim, there is a “frightening spike in anti-Israel and anti-Jewish sentiment around the world”, it is because people now realize they have been lied to for so long by advocates of Zionism camouflaged under a pity-extracting veneer of victimhood. Ms. Waxman, you lied to these people, you told them false, fake, exaggerated, made-up, biased, sculptured stories omitting critical substantive data. So, what do you expect these people, now that they know that you duped them, to do? They are going, at least for an initial while, to react angrily at those who benefited for so long from your lies.
In her and Friedman’s disgruntled harangue against the Associated Press (AP), Ms. Waxman is essentially displaying the behavior of a species in immediate threat of extinction: The western press now realizes the magnitude of its lies and government-imposed bias over the past several decades, and it has no way out but to cannibalize itself: Each mouthpiece is attacking every other mouthpiece and blaming it for the collapse of the traditional press. How lovely! It is truly a blessing to see these criminal idiots who lied to themselves, to each other, and to the public now confront each other. It’s like a Mafia ring that has been dismantled and every Mafioso is telling everything on the other Mafiosi. I never thought I’d live to see the day when the venerable priests of the American press descend into dirty street-fighting.
+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
THE WRAP
The ‘Tectonic Shift’ in Media That Changed Perceptions of Israel: ‘What’s Left Is a System Run by Activists’
Sharon Waxman
Mon, April 1, 2024
JERUSALEM – It gives journalist Matti Friedman no satisfaction to know he was early to realize that a change had come to covering Israel, favoring fixed narratives and activist journalism over a tradition of fact-based reporting.
Friedman, a former reporter and editor at the Associated Press based in Jerusalem from 2006-2011, quit the global news agency after being censored by his editors, and realizing he would have to censor what he and his colleagues knew to be true about the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. And what was the case a decade ago is more true now, he told me.
“The press has been gutted. The bureaus have shrunk, and into that vacuum have come ideological voices,” he said. “Now Human Rights Watch gives you a report, in English, and you write a story based on that report. And you end up serving as the media arm of the hard left, the world of NGOs.”
This mattered less when the conflict had fallen out of the headlines. But now that the heated war between Israel and Hamas has come to dominate the global news cycle, this shift has dramatic consequences on regional tension amid a frightening spike in anti-Israel and anti-Jewish sentiment around the world.
Examples of this shift abound. A 7,000-word piece in The Intercept cast doubt on a New York Times investigation into the sexual assault and mutilation of Israel women by Hamas on Oct. 7; it was clearly aimed at undermining the credibility of the reporting. Early in the war the Times and others reported that Israel deliberately shelled al-Ahli hospital in Gaza City, allegedly killing hundreds — based on information provided by the Hamas-run Health Ministry — and later learning that it was almost certainly an errant shell from a Gazan military group which killed a small fraction of that number. (Google this and you still cannot get any kind of straight answer.)
An Israeli military operation at al-Shifa hospital in recent days that captured a reported 500 Hamas and other fighters and killed nearly 200 (a stunning fact that suggests the hospital isn’t just a “hospital”) has received only sporadic attention in The New York Times, with headlines focused on civilian casualties for well over a week before the headline on March 28: “Fighting Rages Around Two Gaza Hospitals as Pressure on Israel Rises.” Previous coverage seemed skeptical that it even was a military raid, noting in the sub headline of a March 21 article: “The military said it had killed dozens of people it described as terrorists. The account couldn’t be verified.” A second story on March 24 focused on civilian fears at the hospital that relegated the military raid to the 20th paragraph.
The Times’ spokeswoman Danielle Rhoades Ha responded: “In this case of the [al-Ahli] hospital headline, we published a thorough editors’ note to explain the lapse.” She disputed that the recent Shifa hospital raid was not covered as such. “Your question appears to ignore a larger body of coverage of this raid and mischaracterizes the stories referenced — all of which make Israel’s position, that it is targeting Hamas in a military operation, clear.” (I haven’t found that other coverage, and searched again. There are no images reflecting Hamas’s presence in the hospital, and though Israel has released names and titles of senior officials captured or killed, they are not included in Times coverage.) [Ms. Waxman: the New York Times was caught with its pants down; it’s not going to keep playing the deceit game it, and you, played for decades]
In the midst of this is a full-on vacuum of information about who Hamas is, their rule over 2.2 million Palestinians in Gaza and any sense of accountability for their actions in the current conflict. [Really, Ms. Waxman? “vacuum” of information on Hamas? Where have you been? Why haven’t you filled that vacuum when you had a monopoly over the information?]
***
It wasn’t that way when I started my career as a foreign correspondent in Jerusalem, working for Reuters during the first Palestinian intifada in the late 1980s. (Yes, dear reader, you read correctly.) At the time, every major American and European newspaper had a correspondent based in Jerusalem. Most of us spent our time on the ground, in the then-occupied territories and Israel proper, covering the lives of Palestinians and Israelis and writing about their complicated and painful realities as well as the political dynamics that surrounded them. We all used both Israeli and Palestinian freelancers to support our work, but they did not replace going into the field to see for ourselves what was happening. [Stunning patting yourself on the back].
It is very different now. A combination of the decline in newspaper resources for foreign reporting, the rise of an activist strain of progressive journalism and the inability of journalists to report independently from Gaza itself has led to a skewed and often confusing narrative, with a tendency to lean into a simplistic portrait of Israel as an aggressor in this conflict — despite the fact that the country was attacked by Hamas on Oct. 7 — and Palestinians as the victims. [Because the WHOLE truth, and not a one-sided version of it, has come out. People were blind but now they see]
It’s not that Palestinians are not suffering. [Oh thank you; so generous of you to admit it now; but it’s too late for your crocodile tears]. They are, hugely, and one cannot diminish the reality of the fate of Palestinian civilians during this conflict. The crushing loss of life, the deprivation of critical resources — from food instability to lacking medical care to the constant stress of living in a war zone — is horrific. No one can ignore or be unmoved by the images and stories that have emerged from Gaza. But reporting on this is more complicated than it appears. []Really, Ms. Waxman? Tell me more, won’t you? You could have told me more ten, twenty or sixty years ago… why have you only now decided to admit to the suffering of the Palestinians? The answer is because you no longer have the choice, the luxury to mold reality to your favorite side].
I met Friedman, Canadian-born and a longtime [foreign settler] citizen of Israel, on a balmy Friday morning at a cafe in Baka, the old part of Jerusalem not far from the Old City. The cafe is on an old street called “Bethlehem Road,” which in fact points toward Bethlehem. It’s a short drive and a distant galaxy from here to the border with the West Bank.
“This stuff has been brewing for a while,” Friedman said. “It’s erupted now, but the pieces have been in place. There are activists, and those who are cowed by activists, remnants of the Boomers in the system. Those are the old school journalists, but what’s left is a system run by activists.”
As Friedman observed, “the coverage of Gaza is not coverage of a war,” and he wonders why there is so little interest in how Hamas operates in Gaza today to accompany the understandable focus on the suffering of the Palestinian population. “If you consume Western media coverage, it’s not a war,” he said. “It’s a campaign against Palestinian civilians.”
Independent journalists cannot enter the strip today [thanks to Zionist censorship that wants an exclusivity to the information], and Gaza’s side of the conflict is covered by locals — as it was with Gaza before the war. “Palestinian stringers are either intimidated by Hamas, or they are Hamas,” he said. “You can only operate in Gaza if you cooperate with the regime.” [Why then doesn’t Israel allow you, “proper” journalists, to enter Gaza and cover the “facts” as you claim to have done all your life?]
This is not evident to many readers who see the coverage. (I got into an extended exchange on X with a pro-Palestinian reader who found this quite impossible to believe.)
The press has been gutted. The bureaus have shrunk, and into that vacuum have come ideological voices
The AP has a bureau in Gaza, he noted. “Hamas built 750 kilometers of tunnels under Gaza and that was never once worth writing about?” The question was rhetorical, as Friedman knew why — a government the U.S. deemed terrorist was in charge. “We couldn’t cover Gaza properly once Hamas was in control. If you wanted to understand events here you couldn’t do it in the mainstream press.”
A recent heart-rending piece on the front page of the Times about Palestinian civilians buried beneath the rubble of buildings destroyed by Israeli air raids in Gaza had four bylines and one contributor credit. None of them was in Gaza, nor did the story point that out.
Said the Times spokeswoman: “We report from Gaza when permitted, and continue to work with local journalists in Gaza.” To my question about why the Times is not transparent about its inability to report from the ground, she pointed to a one-time note published in December 2023 that explained this in detail. It would be useful to have a link to this note added to stories about Gaza, for those of us who missed it.
Beyond that, an ideological shift in newsrooms has become part of the dynamic affecting reporting on the war. Back in 2014 Friedman wrote an essay in Tablet magazine explaining how his work at the AP was being dictated from above. [Is this really that different from all the other Jewish and Zionist mouthpieces out there, including the New York Times by the way?].
“During the 2008-2009 Gaza fighting I personally erased a key detail — that Hamas fighters were dressed as civilians and being counted as civilians in the death toll — because of a threat to our reporter in Gaza.” [Yeah, sure. Israeli censors wouldn’t do that, would they? They just banned Al-Jazeera, the only foreign news outlet reporting from Gaza] He noted that the policy then and now was not to inform readers that the story was censored unless the censorship was Israeli. The AP’s Jerusalem news editor reported and submitted a story on Hamas intimidation, he wrote, only to find the story back-burnered and never published. [How about reports on Israeli murders, humiliations, home demolitions, land theft, olive grove uprooting, using archaic Ottoman and British regulations from before the birth of Israel to dispossess Palestinians of their rights and property, assassinations, intimidations…? Are Israelis so much better human beings than Palestinians in telling their respective stories? You see, Ms. Waxman, you haven’t learned anything. You are still behaving like the sole proprietor of the truth who may, at will, dispense no truth, some of the truth, a good chunk of the truth, or the whole truth. How decadent of you!]
AP chief of communications Lauren Easton responded that Friedman left the news organization long ago but she did not address the question of censorship. Similarly, in the company’s response to his criticism at the time, it noted only: “The AP does not report many interactions with militias, armies, thugs or governments. These incidents are part of the challenge of getting out the news — and generally not themselves news.”
In response to the question of shrinking coverage and activism seeping into newsrooms, Easton said: “This is a completely inaccurate reflection of the work AP carries out in the region every day, and ignores the vast array of coverage AP journalists have produced — coverage that shows the importance of on-the-ground reporting. Our journalists in both Gaza and Israel have covered this story at great personal risk.”
The personal risk is undeniable. Reporting on foreign conflict has never been more dangerous. But this other, ideological aspect also bears discussion.
The pushback experienced by Friedman reflects a much broader shift in newsrooms that has been coming for years, and created a generational split among those who favor “old school” reporting (like me) and younger reporters who believe their values should inform who gets to report on what topics.
Increasingly, institutions are bending to these demands. The firing of New York Times op-ed editor James Bennet over his publishing a column by Republican Senator Tom Cotton, expressing right-wing views that some at the paper found objectionable, is one example. The signing of a manifesto by reporters condemning Israel for “genocide” is something unimaginable for the previous generation. (In fact The New York Times does not allow such advocacy, and the L.A. Times editor Kevin Merida clashed with his boss, owner Patrick Soon-Shiong, over benching newsroom staff who did so.)
Friedman also pointed out the cancellation of “Jihad Rehab” filmmaker Meg Smaker, who was inexplicably deemed an “Islamophobe” for her Sundance documentary about former Islamic radicals in a rehab center in Saudi Arabia. The film was disinvited from every film festival where it was scheduled to go, including SXSW, after that.
From there it’s a short leap to actual censorship: in recent weeks an essay about the fallout from the war by an Israeli writer and peace activist in the arts magazine Guernica, was unpublished, complete with an apology (yes!) for the mistake of allowing such a creature to be heard.
“The media and arts world is clearly in the thrall of a certain ideology,” Friedman said. “The world is very grey. But the arts world is no longer willing to put up with grey. People want to be in the business of fighting for justice. So instead of covering the circus, they want to be part of the circus.”
This black-and-white construction is most nakedly evident on elite American university campuses where the Palestinian cause is just, no matter the atrocities committed by Hamas, and the Israeli response genocidal [no matter the barbarity of Israel’s Jewish Zionist ultra-orthodox settlers]. The media has begun to reflect aspects of this binary world view.
I asked Friedman what he thought was the biggest misconception Americans have about the Israeli-Hamas conflict. He did not hesitate. “Americans think this is a story about inequality,” he said. And about their own inequality. They graft their politics onto this conflict.” In fact, Friedman said, it’s about something else entirely: “This is a story about the rise of radical Islam – in Iraq. In Syria. Yemen. Algeria. Afghanistan. Parts of Africa. [And the perennial existence of an exclusive racist radical Judaism claiming divine authority to crush other peoples].
“There are six million Jews here trying to hack it. Making good decisions. Bad decisions. It has nothing to do with what’s happening in America. Americans are self-involved.”
His comical example is the time Israel rescued two hostages in Gaza on Super Bowl Sunday, and U.S. commenters suggested Israel had used the event as a diversion. “Most people in Israel have never heard of the Super Bowl,” Friedman said. “It’s a silly example of a real problem. Americans think that everything is about them [Just like a puny population of 15 million wealthy Jews worldwide who get more attention than billions of dispossessed, enslaved, oppressed minorities like the victims of the Jews, the Palestinian people ].”
It’s unclear what the solution is, if there is one. Friedman has become a freelance writer, contributing to The Atlantic magazine and Bari Weiss’s Free Press publication, which has a strong bent against the media politics of the far left. He prefers staying away from mainstream publications. But he is willing to speak up about what he has seen, as few others are.
Can we fix it? [Yes, the “old timers” like Zionist Sharon Waxman should be banned onto some desolate island where they can repeat their monopolistic mantras ad libitum to themselves, and leave the news to historians, fact-checkers, scientists, and ordinary citizens who tell it as it is, without the old timers’ censorship, customizing, and lying by omission. The Christian Reformation eliminated the intercession of the Church, the priest, and the Latin bible between man and God, the information revolution has ditched the intercession of the Press, the journalist and the toilet rag newspaper between citizens and the truth. What a breath of fresh air.]
He shrugged. “The tectonic plates are shifting,” he said. “It’s a time to say what we really think.” [Excellent! Say what you think without hiding it behind a wall of lies]
The post The ‘Tectonic Shift’ in Media That Changed Perceptions of Israel: ‘What’s Left Is a System Run by Activists’ appeared first on TheWrap.
No comments:
Post a Comment