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www.MiddleEast.Org U.S. MEDIA TWISTS AND DISTORTS
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News, Information, & Analysis That Governments, Interest Groups,
and the Corporate Media Don't Want You To Know.
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MORE REASONS MER IS SO MUCH NEEDED
MER - Washington - 12 June:
Last year MER-TV did an extensive and exclusive interview about the
entire situation in the Middle East and the so-called "Peace Process"
with Robert Fisk. Fisk is the correspondent for London's "The Independent".
He has worked out of Beirut and traveled extensively throughout the Middle
East for over 20 years. Simply said he is one of the most experienced,
knowledgeable, and courageous journalists covering the Middle East;
and his articles are always exceptionally insightful
[For instand information on MER-TV and the exclusive
Fisk interview (programs 117-120) email to
INFOMERTV@MiddleEast.Org]
U.S. MEDIA MIRROR DISTORTS MIDDLE EAST
By Robert Fisk in Beirut
NOT LONG ago, I came across an American
colleague of mine in the Marriott Hotel in Cairo.
After three years as Middle East correspondent for
his East Coast paper, my friend was leaving Egypt
for the States; American editors have a habit of
moving their reporters to other beats the moment
they have begun to understand the region. So how
were things on the paper, I asked?
"Usual problems," he replied. "I've just been asked
by my paper to stop referring to 'the right-wing
Israeli government'. My editor said he'd been
getting lots of complaints from members of the
Jewish community back home. So now we just call
it 'the Israeli government'." He shrugged his
shoulders.
I wasn't surprised. American media coverage of the
Middle East has been largely pro-Israeli - and in
their cartoons of Arabs almost racist - for decades,
and United States reporting of the Israeli-Arab
conflict, with honourable exceptions such as the
Christian Science Monitor, is bland to the point of
tedium.
The State Department line on the Middle East,
always skewed toward Israel, has been followed
obsequiously by most American reporters. Only
weeks after United States diplomats were
instructed to refer to the Israeli-occupied West
Bank as "disputed" - rather than "occupied" -
territory, American journalists began using precisely
the same word.
The explosive issue of Israel's expanding Jewish
settlements on occupied land, in contravention of
United Nations resolutions and the Oslo agreement,
has been turned into an argument over real estate.
Bill Clinton's administration has to take account of
extensive American newspaper and television
coverage of the region - and its pro-Israeli bias. Yet
now, with a catastrophe looming and American
public opinion desperately in need of an unbiased
coverage of events, the same David-and-Goliath
story of Israel and the Arabs is being regurgitated
by press and television. US journalists thus bear a
heavy responsibility for their country's crumbling
policies in the Middle East.
There is nothing new in this lop-sided reporting.
After the Sabra and Chatila massacre in 1982,
when up to 2,000 Palestinian civilians were
slaughtered by Israel's Phalangist allies, Newsweek
magazine decided that the death of Princess Grace
of Monaco in a road accident was the more
important story; a week later, their cover story
reported "Israel in Torment" over the massacres;
there was no reference to the "torment" of the
Palestinian victims.
Not once were the Sabra and Chatila murderers
called "terrorists", which they were by Israel's own
definition of the word, presumably because they
were allied to the Israeli army.
The same double standards applied in later years:
when Palestinians set off suicide bombs among
civilians in Israel, the American press universally
called the culprits "terrorists", which they assuredly
were. But when an Israeli slaughtered 29 innocent
Palestinian worshippers in a Hebron mosque, the
US media called the murderer a "fanatic", an
"extremist" or, a new and popular word found
increasingly in the American press, a "zealot". Even
the assassin of Israeli prime minister Yitzhak Rabin
- a Jewish student - was never called a "terrorist".
In this, American journalists have fallen into line with
Israeli law. Only last month the family of a
Palestinian named Khairi Moussa, who was
stabbed to death by an ultra-Orthodox Jew, was
refused state compensation because, under Israeli
law, an Arab killed by a Jew cannot be considered
a victim of "terrorism", although a Jew killed by an
Arab can be. (Needless to say, scarcely any space
was devoted to this extraordinary court case in the
pages of US newspapers.)
Similar attempts to play down Israel's responsibility
for killings in the Middle East could be identified in
1996 when Israeli artillery slaughtered 106
Lebanese refugees sheltering in a UN battalion
headquarters at Qana in southern Lebanon. The
Israelis claimed they were firing at Hizbollah
guerrillas 600 feet from the base - not a single
Israeli was hurt and the Hizbollah were firing at a hill
to the south of Qana. But beneath a photograph of
one of the 55 children massacred by the Israelis,
Time magazine reported that the small victim had
been "killed in crossfire" - a palpable untruth.
In one of the most extraordinary reports of its kind
ever written, the New York Times played down the
killing - five days before Qana - of four children and
two women when an Israeli helicopter fired a
missile into an ambulance in southern Lebanon; not
until the sixth paragraph of his report next day did
the paper's Jerusalem correspondent, Serge
Schmemann, tell his readers about the atrocity.
Earlier paragraphs of his report included news of a
power failure in a bombarded Israeli town and a
statistic of 24 dead in Lebanon "including one Israeli
soldier".
The Washington Post's reporter John Lancaster
later investigated the ambulance attack, reporting
that the driver was "disputing" [sic] Israel's claim, a
false one as it turned out, that the vehicle was
owned by the Hizbollah. But the paper did not
question how Israel could break the rules of war by
firing at a clearly marked ambulance. The New
York Times later ran a syndicated account from an
Israeli paper of an Israeli soldier's life in Qana
before the massacre: but the New York Times
deleted a paragraph about how the Israeli troops
had stolen cars from their Lebanese owners and
looted houses - thus even censoring the Israeli
press.
Time magazine enthusiastically took up the use of
the word "disputed" for the Jewish settlements on
Arab land. By last year, it was able to report on
how Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu
"turns up the heat by okaying [sic] new houses [sic]
in disputed [sic] territory". When Mr Netanyahu
ordered work to begin on a new settlement on a hill
outside east Jerusalem early this year, almost every
American news outlet referred to the "disputed" hill
as Har Homa - giving the location its Jewish identity
but usually ignoring its Arab name, Jebel Abu
Ghoneim.
The use of the misleading word "disputed" has,
sadly, turned up on the BBC, along with references
to settlements as "neighbourhoods" and
"communities", as if their occupants were ordinary
property buyers rather than fanatical, armed
religious Jews who believe God gave them the
territory.
As long ago as 1995, Jerrold Kessel was reporting
on a settlement "dispute" on CNN in which he
referred to Jews talking of "heritage claims going
back hundreds of years". But "heritage claims" differ
mightily; the Palestinian one is based on land deeds
and documents of ownership, the Israeli one on
theology and an apparent conviction that God had
bequeathed Israel the Arab land.
History continues to be short-changed in the
American media. Long after most of the world
realised that the Oslo "peace process" was dead,
US reporters continued to write about putting the
peace process "back on track", and wrote glowing
articles about the supposedly tough-talking US
Secretary of State, Madeleine Albright, even after
she told a press conference in Jerusalem that it was
wrong to compare killing people with "building
houses", her own bland reference to Jewish
settlements on occupied land.
In Paris, Le Monde was last month warning its
readers that Mr Netanyahu and US House speaker
Newt Gingrich were "dangerous" men. But in the
New York Times, the increasingly messianic
Thomas Friedman, an old colleague and friend of
mine, was telling his readers that there was "a
potentially great statesman" inside Mr Netanyahu
who "deserves credit for the fact that there has been
relatively little Palestinian terrorism [sic] these past
two years". After one terrible suicide bombing in
Jerusalem, the mother of an Israeli girl victim wrote
that it was Mr Netanyahu's policies rather than the
Palestinians who had killed her daughter. The Los
Angeles Times put the bombing on page one, and
the mother's remarkable statement on page five.
Academics may one day decide how deeply the
American public has been misled by the persistent
bias of the US media, and the degree to which this
has led them to support US policies which may
destroy America's prestige in the Middle East.
Meanwhile, US reporters are going to have to figure
out a way of telling readers and viewers how a
"dispute" over "neighbourhoods" is turning into war.
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