Skip to main content

One event. Two differently reported versions!

It is difficult not to conclude that The New York Times has, yet again, displayed it's disposition to show bias in the reporting of an incident in Israel involving Palestinians - or else, the reporter is simply not up to the task of being a proper reporter.    Mondoweiss reports - and you can decide.....

"On Friday, Israeli soldiers shot dead 6 Palestinians in Gaza, who were behind the border fence. In the New York Times, Jodi Rudoren said the Israeli troops “opened fire to quell crowds that hurled rocks and rolled burning tires close to the fence separating Gaza from Israel. . .”

Lower in the story, she added:

Lt. Col. Peter Lerner of the Israeli military said there were more than 1000 men ‘attempting multiple times and at multiple locations to storm the border fence throughout the day,’ hurling projectiles including a grenade.

Joel Greenberg, a veteran journalist, covered the same story for the Financial Times. Here are two paragraphs from Greenberg’s report:

Officials in Gaza said six Palestinians were killed and dozens wounded. Witnesses said the shots were fired by snipers at Israeli guard posts along the fence, where Israel enforces a 100-meter-wide no-go zone inside Gaza.

The [Israeli military] spokeswoman could not explain why troops had not instead used non-lethal crowd control weapons, such as tear gas and rubber bullets, routinely used by Israeli forces against violent protests in the West Bank.

There are two possible explanations for Rudoren’s extraordinary bias here.

She is an incompetent, who does not know that an elementary rule in journalism is to interview both sides, instead of working as the stenographer for one of them. If true, we recommend that she study Joel Greenberg’s work.


She knows full well how reporters are supposed to work, but she deliberately set out to cover up the fact that Israeli snipers and other soldiers may have deliberately murdered six Palestinians."

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Robert Fisk's predictions for the Middle East in 2013

There is no gain-saying that Robert Fisk, fiercely independent and feisty to boot, is the veteran journalist and author covering the Middle East. Who doesn't he know or hasn't he met over the years in reporting from Beirut - where he lives?  In his latest op-ed piece for The Independent he lays out his predictions for the Middle East for 2013. Read the piece in full, here - well worthwhile - but an extract... "Never make predictions in the Middle East. My crystal ball broke long ago. But predicting the region has an honourable pedigree. “An Arab movement, newly-risen, is looming in the distance,” a French traveller to the Gulf and Baghdad wrote in 1883, “and a race hitherto downtrodden will presently claim its due place in the destinies of Islam.” A year earlier, a British diplomat in Jeddah confided that “it is within my knowledge... that the idea of freedom does at present agitate some minds even in Mecca...” So let’s say this for 2013: the “Arab Awakening” (the t...

The NPT (Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty) goes on hold.....because of one non-Treaty member (Israel)

Isn't there something radically wrong here?    Israel, a non-signatory to the NPT has, evidently, been the cause for those countries that are Treaty members, notably Canada, the US and the UK, after 4 weeks of negotiation, effectively blocking off any meaningful progress in ensuring the non-proliferation of nuclear weapons.    IPS reports ..... "After nearly four weeks of negotiations, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) Review Conference ended in a predictable outcome: a text overwhelmingly reflecting the views and interests of the nuclear-armed states and some of their nuclear-dependent allies. “The process to develop the draft Review Conference outcome document was anti-democratic and nontransparent,” Ray Acheson, director, Reaching Critical Will, Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), told IPS. “This Review Conference has demonstrated beyond any doubt that continuing to rely on the nuclear-armed states or their nuclear-de...

#1 Prize for a bizarre story.....and lying!

No comment called for in this piece from CommonDreams: Another young black man: The strange sad case of 21-year-old Chavis Carter. Police in Jonesboro, Arkansas  stopped  him and two friends, found some marijuana, searched put Carter, then put him handcuffed  behind his back  into their patrol car, where they say he  shot himself  in the head with a gun they failed to find. The FBI is investigating. Police Chief Michael Yates, who stands behind his officers' story,  says in an interview  that the death is "definitely bizarre and defies logic at first glance." You think?