The view you
get of Gaza is determined by the reporters who send you news. Who are these
reporters?
More
important, how reliable is their reporting?
Here is an
essay from a site called, The Tower Magazine. I cannot endorse this
site. I know nothing about it.
The essay is
from ‘Issue 17’, dated August, 2014. It’s written by Mark Lavie. Here are
excerpts. I have done some editing:
“Why
Everything Reported from Gaza is Crazy Twisted”
You see civilians
dying and suffering in Gaza. You see the destruction Israel’s military
operation against Hamas has caused. You hear from Israel that Hamas is firing
rockets from crowded neighborhoods, using helpless Gaza civilians as human
shields, forcing them to stay in their neighborhoods in defiance of Israeli
warnings to leave.
Why aren’t
you hearing that from Gaza? Often, it’s because reporters are afraid to tell
you.
True, in
some cases, it’s anti-Israel bias. In others, it’s bad journalism. This is part
of the scourge of 21st century “journalism,” with its instant deadlines, the
demands to tweet and blog constantly, the need to get something out there
that’s more spectacular than the competition, and check the facts later, if at
all. Add to that the cruel cutbacks by news organizations around the world. It
all means that fewer and fewer reporters have to file more and more stories,
and file partial reports while they’re working. It’s impossible.
These
elements are part of the reason you’re not getting the whole story from Gaza.
But the most important element is intimidation of reporters on the ground.
It’s nothing
new. I’ve experienced it for decades. Autocratic regimes threaten, attack and
jail reporters who write anything critical of those in power. Other reporters
get the message and just don’t do it.
Bringing
this element of the Gaza situation to light entails some real dangers. It’s a
saga that can’t be told directly in detail. If it is, and if specific reporters
can be identified, people will be harmed. Not just the reporters, but their
families, too.
News
organizations make the safety of their reporters their top priority. Whatever
it takes to keep them out of harm’s way — that’s what is done. I applaud that
and I support that, though everyone understands that the policy can be and is
exploited by tyrannical regimes to your detriment.
For example,
in 2001, a news agency refused to release video it had of Palestinians
celebrating the 9/11 attacks because Palestinian militants threatened the
photographer and his family with murder.
A typical
news report from Gaza a few days ago described the destruction, interviewed
Gaza civilians who related in heart-breaking detail the deaths of their
relatives and loss of their belongings, and listed the hardships and travail
the people are facing because of the Israeli military operation. Halfway
through the long story was a single paragraph that said that Israel claims
Hamas fires rockets from civilian areas. This is how journalists protect themselves
from charges that they didn’t tell “the other side.”
But in fact,
they didn’t. They didn’t report from Gaza about where the Hamas rocket
launchers were, where the ammunition is stored, where the openings of the
tunnels are—if they mention the tunnels at all, which in this case, they
didn’t.
A reporter
for a European news outlet told a friend that he saw Hamas gunmen firing
rockets from outside his hotel, but he didn’t take pictures, certain that if he
had, they would have killed him. He told the tale only after he was safely out
of Gaza. Apparently, his news outlet did not have a permanent local stringer
there, or he would not have been able to speak even from the relative safety of
Tel Aviv without endangering his stringer.
News
agencies, newspapers and TV networks use local Palestinian stringers to do most
of the work on the ground. In this era of cutbacks in my industry, there aren’t
enough reporters, and those they send in are not fluent in Arabic and don’t
know their way around.
Besides the
budgetary limitations, news organizations often hesitate to send reporters into
Gaza at all because of the constant danger, and not from Israeli airstrikes. In
2007, BBC reporter Alan Johnston was kidnapped by Palestinian militants and
held for more than three months. Many other foreign journalists were kidnapped
there and held for a day or two around that time. There have been no
kidnappings recently, but the message was clear—foreigners are fair game. The
message was heard and understood. For lack of an alternative, news
organizations rely more and more on local stringers, giving the regime
considerable leverage through intimidation.
On many
occasions, frightened stringers have pleaded to have their bylines taken off
stories. Some have been “evacuated” from Gaza for a time for their own safety,
after an article critical of the regime was published or broadcast. Families
have been spirited out for a while.
The West
Bank, run by the relatively moderate Fatah, is no better than Gaza’s Hamas in
this regard.
Back in
2000, two Israeli reserve soldiers bumbled their way into Ramallah, where they
were lynched and murdered by a mob. The grisly photo of a Palestinian holding
up his blood-stained hands proudly from a second-story window after the bodies
of the soldiers were thrown out is seared into the memories of Israelis. Yet,
an Italian TV network felt the need to apologize in public for the fact that
there was video of the horrendous event — explaining pitifully that a rival
network was responsible, and that they would never do anything that could
reflect badly on the Palestinian Authority. That’s how “journalism” works in
such places.
Also in the
West Bank, a Palestinian reporter relayed an official Palestinian story from an
Israeli army roadblock near Ramallah, where a pregnant woman had died after “heartless
Israeli soldiers” refused to let her go through to the hospital. The reporter
went to the hospital, where an Arab doctor confirmed the report. Uneasy, the
reporter climbed on foot to the primitive encampment where the woman lived, and
there, her husband refuted the whole story. The delay, he said, was getting her
to the main road and finding a taxi. Once they got to the roadblock, he said,
the soldiers cleared everyone else out of the way and sped them through to the
hospital—but it was too late. The reporter then confronted the doctor, who
admitted that he lied, “for the cause.”
Clearly, the
abuse of reporters and perversion of journalism is not unique to Gaza or the
West Bank. This is the situation all over the region, save Israel. During my
two years in Egypt, I saw some of my colleagues beaten, harassed and arrested. Last
December, the military-backed Egyptian regime jailed reporters for Al-Jazeera,
charging them with belonging to or assisting a terrorist organization.
Some moves against
journalists are quieter. A news outlet once pulled its photographer out of
Saudi Arabia because the regime would not allow him to take pictures of
anything. Local reporters know to steer very clear of controversial subjects.
Both Syria’s
government and some rebel groups operating there kidnap and kill journalists in
the worst case, and severely restrict their movements in the best case. Much of
the “news” coming out of Syria is in the form of video clips made by one side
or the other. Some are so clearly faked that they are almost humorous. Needless
to say, local Syrian stringers walk a very careful line.
All we can do is keep this in mind: the world does not
operate according to our [or Israel’s] democratic standards of freedom of the
press. What we see in news from Gaza may not be the whole truth. In fact, you
can be sure it isn’t.
----
The next time you see a reporter on TV declare that only a
liar would tell you that reporters in Gaza are intimidated, remember this
essay. It might help you understand how news really gets reported from Gaza.
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