4 thoughts on “No Honest Person Should Be Using The HAMAS Casualty Figures For Gaza”
pre-Boomer Marine brat
Dead-bang on target (humor intended, as a compliment), but your phrase “very careful management of the media narrative” points directly at the root problem. Journalism has always had biases, but today the concept of Advocacy Journalism runs through the profession’s body like blood flow. (It’s permissible to bias news reporting if one’s purpose is pure – and, of course, “purity” is a matter of one’s own opinion.)
2002, after a month, the PA was forced to admit that the “Jenin Massacre” was false. The UK Telegraph’s Jerusalem correspondent had bought every bit of it in his dispatches, and the paper never saw fit to admit mea culpa.
2006, Lebanon. Red Cross ambulances hit by Israeli missiles. The “Green Helmet Guy”. Reuters’ photos of MASSIVE smoke above Beirut. Utter BS, but published as gold-plated facts.
2008/9, Gaza. All sorts of evidence of Hamas forcing apartment residents up onto the building roofs, an old man beaten because he wouldn’t go. Hamas command center in Al Shifa Hospital basement, and sniper posts in upper-floor patient rooms. Rocket launcher tubes sand-bagged on another hospital’s roof, and dug in directly beside several UNRWA schools. Large-scale rocket manufacturing in the Jabalya refugee camp.
(Wholly apart from opinion columnists, whose business is precisely that) today’s “news” journalism profession is the world’s second oldest.
I would greatly appreciate a column on that topic. Mid-90s I was cleaning my shelves of no-longer-needed books, and dumped two upon that subject. Don’t remember the titles, and since have frequently beat my head on the wall for getting rid of them. I think AJ was once called something else, and those used that term (with AJ referred to as “the coming trend”.) I also believe that back in that day, it was being taught in university schools of journalism.
Bias in journalism was quite different in the old days. There was a 1985 made-for-TV movie, “The Hearst and Davies Affair”. 12 minutes, 30 seconds into it, Hearst is reading to his chief editor, the strident text of an editorial which Hearst just wrote (regarding keeping the US out of WWI) and wants published. The editor is seriously skeptical, asking if his boss thinks it “reflects majority opinion”. Hearst replies: “I don’t mean to reflect majority opinion. I intend toestablishit!“
Kyle Orton's Blog 
Dead-bang on target (humor intended, as a compliment), but your phrase “very careful management of the media narrative” points directly at the root problem. Journalism has always had biases, but today the concept of Advocacy Journalism runs through the profession’s body like blood flow. (It’s permissible to bias news reporting if one’s purpose is pure – and, of course, “purity” is a matter of one’s own opinion.)
2002, after a month, the PA was forced to admit that the “Jenin Massacre” was false. The UK Telegraph’s Jerusalem correspondent had bought every bit of it in his dispatches, and the paper never saw fit to admit mea culpa.
2006, Lebanon. Red Cross ambulances hit by Israeli missiles. The “Green Helmet Guy”. Reuters’ photos of MASSIVE smoke above Beirut. Utter BS, but published as gold-plated facts.
2008/9, Gaza. All sorts of evidence of Hamas forcing apartment residents up onto the building roofs, an old man beaten because he wouldn’t go. Hamas command center in Al Shifa Hospital basement, and sniper posts in upper-floor patient rooms. Rocket launcher tubes sand-bagged on another hospital’s roof, and dug in directly beside several UNRWA schools. Large-scale rocket manufacturing in the Jabalya refugee camp.
(Wholly apart from opinion columnists, whose business is precisely that) today’s “news” journalism profession is the world’s second oldest.
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The spread and now conquest of Advocacy Journalism has been an awful development.
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I would greatly appreciate a column on that topic. Mid-90s I was cleaning my shelves of no-longer-needed books, and dumped two upon that subject. Don’t remember the titles, and since have frequently beat my head on the wall for getting rid of them. I think AJ was once called something else, and those used that term (with AJ referred to as “the coming trend”.) I also believe that back in that day, it was being taught in university schools of journalism.
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Bias in journalism was quite different in the old days. There was a 1985 made-for-TV movie, “The Hearst and Davies Affair”. 12 minutes, 30 seconds into it, Hearst is reading to his chief editor, the strident text of an editorial which Hearst just wrote (regarding keeping the US out of WWI) and wants published. The editor is seriously skeptical, asking if his boss thinks it “reflects majority opinion”. Hearst replies: “I don’t mean to reflect majority opinion. I intend to establish it !“
That was “old school”.
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