The Media are not allowed into Gaza.

  The media are merely conglomerates that sell column inches and air time. Others are state-funded bureaucracies with fixed ideological agendas.

 Journalists exhibit almost conceit when they insist that they have some natural right to stroll onto any battlefield. In truth, there are many places and proceedings to which journalists are denied access: cabinet meetings, intelligence briefings, jury deliberations, corporate boardrooms, trade negotiations, Papal conclaves, nuclear command bunkers, sports team strategy sessions, and Hollywood movie sets. The list is endless.

 No serious person imagines democracy has collapsed because reporters cannot barge into NATO’s war rooms. However, when it comes to Israel, the rules are magically rewritten. The expectation is that the Jewish state must fling wide its gates and allow hostile scribblers to tramp about a war zone as though it were an open-air museum.

 Consider, too, the international press’ record. Since day one of the war, they have parroted Hamas falsehoods, recycled invented casualty figures, and published photographs that even a  child could see are staged or fake. They have splashed headlines across the globe that would disgrace a provincial gossip paper.

 Coverage of the Israel-Hamas war has been the most contemptible display of reporting ever.

 When the press has consistently demonstrated hostility to Israel and indifference to truth, why would Jerusalem confer privileges upon it? The news media has shown itself to be neither neutral nor trustworthy. It has not yet grasped the contempt with which they are now held.

 Why should a country at war with a genocidal enemy invite in hostile agitators who will lie about its every move?

Dishonest Headlines Parrot Hamas Claim

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Honest Reporting - BY EMANUEL MILLER  MAY 5, 2019

 https://honestreporting.com/dishonest-headlines-parrot-hamas-claim/

Any journalist worth their salt knows that their work requires describing what has happened, and reporting the whole story. When reporters are unable to determine exactly what happened, standard procedure is to report what the various parties claim, and let the readers make their own judgments.

Those simple standards, however, were repeatedly not met by numerous reporters covering the latest flare-up of violence between Israel and terror organizations Hamas and Islamic Jihad in the Gaza Strip.

More than 600 rockets have been fired at Israel since Saturday morning, and Israel is responding by targeting terrorists, as well as Islamic Jihad and Hamas’s facilities. Amid the ongoing exchange of fire, a pregnant woman and her 14-month old daughter were killed in unclear circumstances. Despite the IDF refusing to accept responsibility for the deaths, Palestinian sources were predictably swift to blame Israel, and the British media quickly picked up on the story.

The IDF later put out a statement on Twitter, reading: “Today we can say with certainty, after looking into the event, that they were killed as a result of an explosion of combustible materials during the activation of a Hamas explosive device.” A later tweet went further, accusing journalists of complicity, saying they had “amplified the lie.”

Israel Defense Forces

✔@IDF

Yesterday, Palestinian weapons caused the tragic death of a mother in Gaza and her baby. Hamas blamed Israel. Journalists amplified the lie. Our assessment indicates that the incident had nothing to do with IDF strikes.

Headline Fails

More than any other part of an article, headlines matter the most. The vast majority of people don’t read any given article, only skimming through newspapers and social media feeds. As such, headlines frame the way people read and remember stories.

Despite the paucity of evidence to back up the claim that the IDF was responsible for the deaths, numerous media services parroted the claims put out by the Hamas-run Gazan Ministry of Health – frequently in the most prominent place – the headline.

Another example came courtesy of Sky News, with a headline published on Sunday afternoon saying only that a “Pregnant Palestinian woman and baby [were] killed in Gaza violence.” The article documents the death of the two within the context of “a fresh round of violence between Israel and militants in Gaza.” Only in the seventh paragraph does the article mention that “the Israeli military insisted the pair died due to a misfiring Palestinian rocket.”

Sky News: “Pregnant Palestinian woman and baby killed in Gaza violence”

The same issue surfaced in a report on the website of British television channel ITV which claimed that “A baby girl and her pregnant aunt were among six killed by Israeli airstrikes in Gaza.”

ITV claims baby and pregnant aunt were “killed after Israel airstrikes”

Over at The Independent, the massive barrage of over 400 rockets fired from Gaza on Israel was totally omitted from the Middle East section homepage until Sunday morning. When events were eventually covered, the headline framed developments as if terrorists in Gaza had no role in the violence, and insinuated that Israel was responsible for the death of the mother and baby. The original article (archived here) said without qualification that “A pregnant mother and her 14-month-old baby girl have been killed by an Israeli airstrike, as cross-border violence continues near Gaza.”

Independent headline: Mother and baby killed as Israel hits Gaza with airstrikes

Meanwhile at The Daily Mail, the same claim was again quoted in the headline despite the IDF’s protestations that it was not involved in the death of the pregnant Gazan mother.

HonestReporting

✔@HonestReporting

No @MailOnline, when something "rains down," it's indiscriminate. The only thing raining down right now is Palestinian rockets on Israel. The Israeli response is pinpointed. Your headline is inverted.

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The Mail’s coverage originally stated that “Gaza’s Health Ministry said a 14-month-old girl, Seba Abu Arar, was killed in an Israeli airstrike that hit their home,” but failed to mention that the claim was disputed by Israel. The article was later update to acknowledge the IDF’s version of events.

As HonestReporting tweeted on Sunday, journalists are responsible for telling the whole story, not just the parts that fit in with their worldview. Anything less is a professional failure.

HonestReporting

✔@HonestReporting

Whether journalists believe the IDF's statements or not, the media have a duty to report the story fully. Telling one side alone is willfully naive at best, and a worrying betrayal of the truth at worst.

Israel Defense Forces

✔@IDF

Yesterday, Palestinian weapons caused the tragic death of a mother in Gaza and her baby. Hamas blamed Israel. Journalists amplified the lie. Our assessment indicates that the incident had nothing to do with IDF strikes.

THE GRAVE DANGER OF MEDIA BIAS

Video of the week - Hamas's Accomplishments in 13 years! ! https://tinyurl.com/yahyzbvj

 JPost, by Adam Milstein  20-8-2018

For the full article go to; https://tinyurl.com/y777hsct

This past May, the Los Angeles Times ran the headline “A Baby Girl Dies in the Haze of Gaza,” which told a story about eight-month-old Palestinian Layla Ghandour, who was allegedly killed by inhaling tear gas used by Israeli defense forces. This story was tragic and upsetting. It was also untrue. The New York Times and other major outlets published similar stories, framing Israel and Israeli soldiers as child-killing villains, amplifying Hamas’s false narrative about Layla’s death.

Following this wave of coverage, Layla’s cousin admitted that Hamas paid his relatives to lie to the media about Layla’s cause of death. In reality, Layla died from a preexisting blood condition. Of course, the family of a deceased baby deserves any rational person’s sympathy, but when the media falls prey to Hamas propaganda that uses the death of an innocent baby to degrade Israel, no one, except for Hamas, wins. Even today, this story continues to be available for a wide audience to read and reference, without any disclaimer that it is based on falsified information. 

Then, amid this summer’s Great March of Return protests, each one a violent attempts to cross into Israel’s borders and kill civilians, the LA Times reported on June 18 that “about 130 protesters have been killed by Israeli troops.” In fact, the group of “protesters” consisted of a significant number of armed and active Hamas combatants. The Times ignored this fact and the intent of this march, as prior to this coverage, a senior Hamas official had admitted that most of the Gazans who died in the protests were Hamas members, terrorist operatives with the intention of killing innocent Israeli men, women and children.

This misinformation matters because media outlets have great power. They shape the way we understand the world and, ultimately, drive our behavior. It is no exaggeration to say that their activity can have life-and-death implications. The pattern in coverage of the New York Times and LA Times is a case study that drives home a critical point for society.

In the 1930s and 1940s, the New York Times, Washington Post and other media outlets neglected their obligation to disseminate truth and remained virtually silent as Nazi Germany carried out the mass murder of Jews in Europe, relegating stories about Jewish genocide to short briefs on their back pages. While Jews starved in ghettos and concentration camps, watched their family members perish and were stripped of their humanity, they wondered where the world was. The press remained largely indifferent and the reluctance of editors of major outlets to report widely and consistently on these horrors contributed to consequences that the world will never forget. Newspapers and radio news broadcasts failed to fulfill their part in educating the American public about the horrific crimes committed by the Germans.

The role of journalists is to shine a light where there is darkness, to tell the stories of the powerless and hold the powerful to account. 

We must hold the media accountable for honest reporting. We must reject and condemn stories that spread inaccurate information and newspapers that fail to broadcast corrections as dramatically as they broadcast untruths. If journalists fail to understand that antisemitism is a deeply embedded bigotry that persistently impacts their understanding of the world – and a hatred that is central to Hamas’ political actions – they cannot accurately report on actions at the Gaza-Israel border. A story pinning the death of an innocent Palestinian baby on Israeli soldiers should raise a red flag. Journalists must present facts and a careful understanding of the nuances that shade coverage of complex situations. A headline taken out of context should not be tolerated.

Media bias and misreporting are more than just a nuisance. They blur our vision for a better world. When we cannot see clearly, we risk our values, our democracy and ultimately, our humanity. 

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