Spiegel catalogue of media manipulation

With respect to Israeli censorship, check out these stories from Germany's Spiegel.

First we have News on a Platter, which deals with how "professionally" Israel wrangles the media.

Not all the information circulated in such a controlled atmosphere, of course, is to be believed. But it's hard to criticize Israel for wanting to see victims of Hezbollah rockets - 17 killed since the beginning of the war against the militant group - in the media. Indeed it is precisely these victims that fuel the Israeli operations currently raging in southern Lebanon.

PR warriors take to the mountains

Still, Israel's support and supervision of foreign journalists seems downright excessive. As soon as you've received your press credentials from the GPO, you're bombarded with e-mails and phone calls. When covering other crisis regions, German reporters often have to make an effort to be extra nice and polite and have to search out interviewees and contacts themselves. Not here. In Israel, reporters are on an all-inclusive package trip - and are well looked after.

Well-thought-out story ideas including transportation, lunch and selected military experts - all these things are offered without ever having to be asked for. Many journalists happily accept the offer. For days, images of Israeli artillery units flickered on TV screens the world over - one reason of course being that the PR warriors always took the camera teams to the frontlines around sunset. The soft, warm twilight is favored by camera men and photographers.

That's contrasted with Hezbollah's tactic, which is Letting the Images Speak for Themselves.

We've reached the end of a tour, organized by Hezbollah, through the almost entirely devastated neighborhood of Haret Hreik in southern Beirut. We're back by the collapsed highway bridge that cuts the neighborhood into two halves. Hussein Nabulsi, one of Hezbollah's press spokesmen, announces that we will meet here again tomorrow at the same time.

"I would kindly ask the CNN team to be on time tomorrow," he says. "You've been late the last three times already."

Even if a certain sense of routine has developed after two weeks of de facto war - Hezbollah is hardly pro-active in its relations with the foreign press, represented in Beirut by dozens of foreign reporters. There's no real method to be discerned behind the militia's public relations work. While some camera teams that tried to film in Dahieyeh on their own were immediately pressured to leave the neighborhood - a Hezbollah stronghold in southern Beirut - and escorted north by men on motor scooters, other journalists were able to move as freely as they like. The journalist's ID issued by the Lebanese Interior Ministry is scrupulously checked at some street crossings - at others, however, reporters are waved through before documents can even be produced.

For all the Right Wing Flogosphere's yellling about Hezbollah photo-ops at Qana, where two families decimated by Israeli bombs, and how CNN's Nic Robertson neglected to mention he was on a Hezbollah-guided tour of the rubble in Beirut, there's little said about Israeli media manipulation by anybody.

If only all media organizations did what Spiegel does. Just scroll down to the bottom of this story about a badly injured young Israeli soldier raring to get back into action.

Note: The Israeli soldier Wizer was selected as an interview partner by the Israeli army following a request by SPIEGEL ONLINE. Two press speakers of the Israeli army were present during the interview. The press speakers briefed the soldier for 10 minutes prior to the interview.

There should be transparency on both sides.

H/t to Carlos and David C.

Comments

[Mike]

It's funny they mention Qana, where the staging is apparent... 58 reported killed is confirmed by the Lebanese as 28 killed... did the others come back to life ? The time of the bombing and the time of the building falling don't match... the photos show certain crew members wearing different clothing in different clothing... etc etc. You can argue if the Israelis are excesively controlling the media, but you'd be hard pressed to find them staging shows like the show in Qana.

[Classic]

"images of Israeli artillery units flickered on TV screens the world over"
"the Lebanese militia is concentrating on a simple strategy: Let the images speak for themselves." - linked article

_Have there been any media-carried images of any of the 2000+ attacking rocket missiles - while being launched by Hezbollah, during these last few weeks alone?

[Reality Check]

Honestly AZ, this feels like 1939 to me.

"Iran Leads Islamic Nations in Demanding End to Mideast War" yet paragraph 4 of the actual story contains this gem:

"Although the main cure (to the situation) is the elimination of the Zionist regime, in this stage an immediate ceasefire should be implemented," Ahmadinejad, who previously has said Israel should be wiped off the map, told the closed door meeting."

I feel that even the Western media sugar coats the statements and actions of Israeli enemies as part of a natural journalistic tendency to achieve "balance."

One almost never sees direct quotes from source material like the Hamas Charter or the Palestinian National Covneant, both of which contain very clear wording that is offensive to all but Mel Gibson and his disciples.

If you feel that images don't lie and shouldn't be censored or explained away, then why should words on the written record be hidden away?

And it now turns out that the death toll in Qana is less than half intiailly reported. (Although I accept that it's still a horrible event even if "only" 29 people died.) But will there be a retraction? And today 7 Israeli civilains were killed in rocket attacks launched specifially at them-i.e., not as collateral damage.

Will the Western media rush in with camera crews and report on "body after body being removed on stretchers?"

It feels to me that the Left views the Arabs as the "oppressed" and the Jews as the "aggressors" and that this view colours its reporting.

Gahhhh!

ENOUGH with Israel and 'The One' already! I love your blog, Antonia, but come on... isn't there any dirt lately about the media many of your readers care about, like goings-on at The Star, The Globe, The Sun, Maclones, TVO, etc?

[Antonia Z.]

It's summer. It's hot. There's a war on. People are away. Blah blah blah.

As for the posts about The One, they're about much more than a reality show failure. They speak to the utter bankruptcy of CBC-TV management.

[sooey]

oh. i guess either arab leaders stfu or everybody gets it. well then. nicely done, rc. very succinct.

[Jay Currie]

Antonia, trying to draw a specious equivalency between the Israelis feeding the foreign press a hot lunch and giving them access to what they want to see and Hezbollah's hardcore coercion is really not going to fly.

And nice to see that the Qana photo-op - no thanks to you - is coming unravelled.

Now, work with me here: artillery at sundown, dead baby wrangler holding up baby so reporters can get the best angle...it exactly the same right. Nothing to choose between the two, no judgement could possibly be made.

[arthurdecco]

"...dead baby wrangler holding up baby so reporters can get the best angle..." posted by Jay Currie

Jay Currie, when I think you cannot fall into the pit of depravity any further - you do.

How emotionally damaged do you have to be to so casually dismiss death, destruction and despair? How calloused a soul do you have to have to use the body of a murdered baby to make whatever sick point you were trying to make about…what or who exactly …Hizbollah …Israel?

Why don't you give it a rest for a few days, Jay? I'm having trouble enough dealing with the reality of this monstrous crime against humanity without hearing you mock the deaths of babies and all of the other innocents that will never see the sun rise again. And I'm sure I'm not alone in thinking so.

Disgusting.

[Randall Isaacs]

Arthurdecco: Here are words of comfort you:

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20060803/wl_afp/mideastconflictiranoic

Meanwhile, for the more reasonable of you out there, this is not what is being reported in the Canadian media:

http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/local/crime/bal-fire0803,0,7129549.story?coll=bal-local-headlines

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20060804/wl_asia_afp/mideastconflictaustraliaindonesiaattacks

http://ejpress.org/article/9821

And I can expand the list if you'd like.

[Jay Currie]

Just so long as I have your attention Arthur.

The predictable result of using babies as shields is that you have dead babies. That is simple barbarism.

What really works for me is Hezbollah's willingness to find the silver lining with the photo-op. A photo-op which even our grcious hostess concedes was just that.

Disgusting, you bet.

[Antonia Z.]

Just for the record, I deleted a reply from Arthur Decco here, even though I agreed with it.

[Todd]

Reality Check said:

"It feels to me that the Left views the Arabs as the "oppressed" and the Jews as the "aggressors" and that this view colours its reporting."

WRT that first clause about who the aggressors are: it wasn't the Arabs who stole Palestine from the Zionists . . . .

WRT the second on reporting: do you seriously believe that "The Left" has _any_ mainstream media control or say or even influence? Or do you just habitually lump together political ideologies to the left of Reform?

Your handle's ironic beyond belief.

[Arik]

"about who the aggressors are: it wasn't the Arabs who stole Palestine from the Zionists . . . ."

I look forward to reading responses to the questions contained herein:

http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=7856#c0019

[Todd]

LOL!

Wow! I've never seen so many ways to avoid the question at hand put together in one place (and such a place) before.

Not one of them addresses my point, Sonny: I'm not talking about the Wall, I'm not talking about "Occupied Territories" (although much could be said about Southern Lebanon, the Golan Heights, and Transjordan as the Zionist's "historical Israel"), I'm not talking about other countries' expulsion of Jews, etc.

I'm talking about the deliberate planning and execution of population transfer, by fair means or foul, accompanied by attacks on any form of resistance, ordered by a bunch of terrified religio-racially minded people.

[Arik]

http://www.detnews.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20060805/OPINION03/608050307/1372

quote

As we watch Hezbollah's horrible parade of dead children in Qana replay endlessly on television, here is a suggestion for all the intrepid American journalists gallivanting with Hezbollah's handlers in the region: Perhaps you could put down the figurative hookah pipes, take off your sympathy hajibs and find out the identity of the green-helmeted guy holding up baby corpses in Qana as props for your sensational, page-one pictures.

Is he just an ordinary bystander? A rescuer who just happened to be in the same place 10 years ago, traipsing around with dead children's bodies to exploit an accidental Israeli bombing prompted by terrorists hiding behind civilians? A civilian volunteer or a propaganda producer?

To his credit, MSNBC reporter Richard Engel picked up on a question the blogosphere has been asking since the toddler corpse-paraders in Qana took center stage: Where were all the men? His reporting underscores Hezbollah's evil m.o. -- embedding themselves in civilian populations to force exactly the kind of tragic error from Israel that appears to have occurred at Qana.

"[W]e went house to house in trying to figure out where all the young men were. It seems that some of them were fighters, some of them were Hezbollah members that were out -- this according to Hezbollah people who didn't want to be interviewed but we convinced them to talk to us."

unquote

Assuming that the Detroit Free Press and MSNBC constitute acceptable voices on a media blog.

[John W]

Why is the Canadian media not treating the Canadian UN peacekeeper who was killed in Lebanon as a national hero?

[Arik]

Probably because Lewis MacKenzie ruined the opportunity for them.

http://cbc.ca/metromorning/media/20060726LMCJUL26.ram

[Jay Currie]

Antonia, why not let arthurdecco's comment run. There is no reason - unless it is libelous rather than simply bilious - not to let him speak. Especially if you agree with what he is saying.

Arthur has a colourful way of expressing himself which makes his points very clear indeed. Perhaps too clear.

[Jay Currie]

Oh, and while I am here: you stated that the subject photographs were not used in the MSM. If you pop over to http://eureferendum.blogspot.com/2006/08/qana-directors-cut.html you will get chapter and verse as to exactly where they were used. Front page of the Independent, the Guardian, Daily Telegraph, Newsweek and so on.

[Arik]

"Letting the images speak for themselves," indeed.

http://littlegreenfootballs.com/weblog/?entry=21956_Reuters_Doctoring_Photos_from_Beirut&only

[Jay Currie]

Check out the animated gif of al-Reuters fake "smoke over Beruit" pic at:

http://www.leftandright.us/index.php/site/reuters_faking_photos/

The trick with Photoshop is to clone just the smoke....not the buildings.

And, remember Antonia, these images are being used all over the MSM so none of the "I haven't seen any of them in any mainstream media, so it's irrelevant." dodge.

Time to recognize that Reuters, at least, has been playing the photo manipulation game in support of Hezbollah. Which means that all of its photos - including Qana - have to be called into question.

[stephen.reeves]

Good article in the Star today by Anna Morgan, about the Hez propaganda outlet, the rest of you can read McQuaig and Siddiqui,(I don't bother, they say the same thing everyweek)

[arthurdecco]

I won’t repeat my response to your hateful post that Antonia deleted out of respect for her position here as our benevolent but battle-hardened/weary hostess. But I will say this…

It was your callous disregard for the dignity, (in death), of the helpless, hapless, terrorized children of Lebanon that spurred the now-deleted response from me. Your reply to my original post, (itself a response to your verbal violence, where I told you how disgusted I was with you for using dead Lebanese babies as a prop in your pathetic propaganda keyboard war), filled me with a sadness so profound I was reduced to typing through tears as I replied once again to the outrageous garbage you’ve deluded yourself into thinking so clever.

You care nothing for humanity. For morality. For ethical thinking. You have become an advocate for murder and an apologist for murderers right here in front of my eyes!

[Arik]

Reuters withdraws the photo after being busted on the fraud.

http://www.ynetnews.com/articles/0,7340,L-3286966,00.html

No word on whether there will be any sanction against the photographer, Adnan Hajj, who took one of the iconic shots of the dust-covered child with pristine blue pacifier at Qata.

This pattern of fraud and misrepresentation calls for a thorough review of Hajj's Reuters photographs. Of all Reuters photographs, frankly, given the failure of its editorial controls.

[Arik]

Correction, Reuters has suspended "a" photographer, presumably Hajj.