"Even when the media makes up things to blame Israel for, it's Israel's fault." -- Mere Rhetoric.
I have to think of something new to say; I can't just keep saying "this is unbelievable." But this is unbelievable.
(YNetNews.com) A number of journalists claimed during a convention in Jerusalem Monday evening that Israel and the IDF were mostly to blame for the way the foreign media covered the Lebanon war.
All the Big Boys were there - the Associated Press, al Reuters, Aljazeera - but Steven Erlanger of the New York Times gets the most attention in the YNet report. His blaming Israel and the IDF would be laughable, but don't forget, a good number of people (like for instance, 99.9% of liberal Jews) still take the NY Times seriously.
The New York Times Jerusalem Bureau Chief, Steven Erlanger, expressed surprise that Israel’s view of the war was different to that of its critics, and said that Israelis didn’t “quite grasp how the war was perceived outside of Israel.”He lamented the lack of “proportionality” in the war, adding: “This is a charge that came against Israel from the United Nations... the French, the Italians.”
The New York Times bureau chief also said that Israelis “were not interested in whether 1,000 Lebanese civilians needed to die,” adding that the question of “whether Israel fought a proportional war is not much of interest here (in Israel).”
Erlanger added that during the war, he “took General Yadlin (who briefed the press on IDF operations) too seriously.”
Erlanger told the panel he turned down an offer by the IDF Spokesperson Unit to gain access to IDF efforts aimed at enabling humanitarian aid to reach Lebanon, saying he was not interested in the story.
Now read how Erlanger explains himself over at The Media Line (Warning: You may experience a moment or two of cognitive dissonance):
TML: What would you like newspaper readers to understand about the work of a field reporter?ERLANGER: I would like them to understand…editors to understand too…that stories do not just appear full blown on a screen or a piece of paper, they are made of a long series of judgments, .... You bring your whole experience to bear, and sometimes you're lucky and sometimes you get the people that you need to talk to in time and sometimes you're unlucky and sometimes things get cut out of your copy in the middle of the night because suddenly an ad pops up or some space shrinks or something else happens they have to cram into the paper and they end up taking out just the balancing paragraph you worked so very hard to get in and when you went to bed was in and that's the part that hurts because then you get attacked by people and you know why they are attacking. And you go through this bit of a crisis, because obviously I stand by what was printed, but sometimes you know what is printed isn't exactly what I would have liked to be printed, but it's not my job to try to blame other people...
It is people making judgments, these are not opinionated judgments, these are judgments about what needs to be done, and what holes there are and doing it very often very late at night, very early in the morning, traveling distances, going out into the field, sometimes being shot at and sometimes not. People are not kind of sitting around on their behinds in air-conditioned offices all the time opining -- that is not what we do. And that's what I hope people will understand.
There isn't a kind of scoreboard that we use, what we try to do is over time, is to give people the best, most accurate narrative that we can and that's partly about analysis, context…
Maybe the key phrase here is "over time." If we are patient and wait a few more years, Erlanger might develop a taste for covering some Jewish perspectives. I mean, c'mon, he lives in Jerusalem after all.
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