My good friend Omri Ceren has a superb post over at Big Journalism:
It must be insanely frustrating to do media outreach or public diplomacy for Israel.
It’s not only that media outlets seem to have an endless supply of anti-Israel storylines that they just mix and match regardless of context, from lurid descriptions of imagined atrocities to old standbys about Palestinian dispossession. It’s also that journalists and editors seem to pick their themes with something approaching reckless abandon, throwing against the wall one thinly sourced anti-Israel libel after another. If something sticks they congratulate themselves on brave journalism. If a smear is debunked they just shrug and move on.
The problem isn’t so much a resistance to specific facts, though the BBC has indeed been conspicuously ignoring Israeli evidence that contradicts their preferred take on reality. It’s just that being wrong is a functionally costless proposition if the error works against Israel, so journalists can publish an endless stream of sensational accusations with minimal concern for their veracity. All they need is a quote, which anti-Israel partisans are more than willing to provide, and that qualifies as fact-checking.
The reports surrounding Israel’s Monday raid on the Mavi Marmara ship stands as a veritable textbook on how that coverage plays out in real time.
The flagship of the Gaza “Freedom Flotilla,” transporting ostensibly humanitarian aid to Iran’s ostensibly impoverished proxies in the Gaza Strip, was part of the ostensibly nonviolent fleet seized by Israeli naval commandos. The ship was contacted by Israel and asked to unload its cargo for inspection, the captain explicitly declared the fleet’s intention to breach Israel’s blockade of the Gaza Strip, and the Israelis dispatched commandos to intercept it.
That was when the gentle humanitarians on the Marmara executed a carefully planned ambush, attacking the Israeli commandos with knives and metal pipes while the soldiers waited 40 minutes for permission to use live fire. Meanwhile they tried to defend themselves with paintball rifles, while one commando after another was brutally assaulted. Several ended up in the hospital in critical condition.
Read the whole thing..and look at the videos accompanying it.
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