News Flash? Fishwrap Bureau Chief in Jerusalem.... Not Objective

CAMERA blog, SnapShot:

... judging by [Jodi] Rudoren's recent story about Palestinian prisoners on a hunger strike, published online on May 3 and in print the following day, [concerns about her objectivity] are certainly being borne out.

You can read some criticism of the story  here, here and here.

Below we take a look at the piece by the numbers:

• Number of quoted words by Palestinian supporters of Palestinian prisoners: 269

• Number of quoted words by Israelis explaining the rationale behind administrative detention (or anything else): 0

• Number of words by Rudoren (or anyone else) discussing Israeli rationale behind administrative detention: 0

• Number of paragraphs before Rudoren gets around to letting readers know that the stars of her article are members of Islamic Jihad: 14

• Countries and groups that list Islamic Jihad as a terrorist organization include: The United States, Canada, The European Union, The United Kingdom and Australia.

• Rudoren's description of Islamic Jihad: "a radical and militant Palestinian faction."

• Number of other articles in May 4 edition of the New York Times that use the words "terrorist," "terrorist organization," terrorist network" or "terrorist attack" to describe non-Palestinian groups, individuals and attacks: 6

• Number of people murdered by Islamic Jihad: Hundreds

• Number of rockets fired at Israeli cities and towns by Islamic Jihad: Hundreds

• Number of references in the article to those attacks: 0

• Number of days after extremist activist Ali Abunimah complained to Rudoren on Twitter about lack of coverage of the prisoners' hunger striker before Rudoren authored what Abunimah endorsed as her "must read" report: 4

 

 

I'm sorry to say this...  I'm sure the good folks and word-counters at CAMERA and SnapShot are very well intentioned, but c'mon! They've been monitoring Dhimmedia for years now and the "reportage" has only gotten worse.

Who in the world expected Jodi Rudoren to be objective rather than typical?  I don't understand why that was even a question in anyone's mind.

CAMERA claims that after THIRTY YEARS of its multi-g'zillion-dollar existence, its "combination of rigorous monitoring, research, fact-checking, careful analysis, and grassroots efforts have had a documented impact."

If "documented impact" means garnering newspaper corrections in small print after the fact, that may be true, but the Big Picture has only gotten uglier. We need to rethink a wide range of supposedly helpful efforts and quit doing what doesn't work.

In my humble opinion.

Comments

[Mannie Sherberg]

Let's not kid ourselves: The best efforts of Camera and every other group or individual struggling to make the truth about Israel prevail will do little or nothing to improve the "Big Picture." We are -- every one of us -- preaching to the choir. The people who must be reached and whose minds must be changed are impervious to what the West has traditionally called "Truth." What we are dealing with is a whole generation -- or even two generations -- who have been schooled in Postmodernism, a doctrine that holds that there is no Truth with a capital "T," that all opinions are relative, that all the so-called truths traditionally accepted by the West are actually falsehoods that have been imposed on the powerless by the powerful, and that, in a nutshell, Jodi Rudoren's version of events in the Middle East is every bit as valid as Bibi Netanyahu's or actually more so, since Rudoren's version takes the side of the "powerless" Palestinians while Netanyahu''s version takes the side of the "powerful" Israelis, and the side of the powerless is always to be preferred over the side of the powerful. This kind of thinking is now so deeply entrenched in Western culture that all the writings of all the pro-Israel writers in the world cannot breach it. It will take an enormous cultural upheaval throughout the West -- and particularly the United States -- to topple the intellectual fortress that calls itself Postmodern. Such an upheaval is nowhere in sight. Those of us who advocate for the State of Israel will be preaching to the choir -- and only the choir -- for a long time to come.