This will be quick because I have to get myself ready to go hear the panel at the conference that I most want to hear, featuring our own Lisa, along with Michael Totten, and some other cool folks. And I just woke up. I had a million things to do this morning but I simply couldn’t get up. I have a sore throat from hell this morning. It is very red. I feel exhausted. I think I have cat scratch fever. Well, in this instance, cat bite fever. This would be because I am an idiot. This would be because I did not heed the really good advice of so many of you really good people for two days. This would so totally serve me right…but I don’t want to be served right. Waaaah. C’mon little antiobiotics do your thing!!
Excuse me, I’m an idiot could also be the mantra of some of the folks on one of the sets of panels I heard yesterday. They should embrace their idiocy as am I, but sadly, I think they are completely unaware. Suffice it to say that I don’t buy that journalists around the world who are dealing with stories about terror and terrorists and who cover our little area of the desert in particular are all suffering, en masse, from Stockholm Syndrome. Ahem, yeah.
The other panel I heard though, hosted by Allison, rocked. It was really interesting. Oh and you can get the conference schedule and still come on over to the afternoon events if you are just about anywhere in this country at this moment at Allison’s link above. More in a bit.
I’m just curious, do Israelis have an insatiable appetite for sleazy celebrity gossip? I know here in North America we do, I was just wondering if people in Israel enjoy trash gossip as well.
Very diplomatic to refer to those folks simply as idiots. I could say much worse (and in fact did, sitting up in front of my computer until the wee hours last night blogging about it). It was great to see you (and despite the fact that you may have been feeling sick, if it’s any consolation, you didn’t look sick at all)!
Liza, heh trying to be diplomatic around the gag reflex. If I had attended the morning session, on top of the ones I heard on Sunday, I might have become homicidal. Truly. Excruciatingly. Painfully. EMBARRASSING. event.
Now you know why so many of us abroad are cynical about supporters of Israel, and by extension, Israel itself.
I don’t buy that journalists around the world who are dealing with stories about terror and terrorists and who cover your little area of the desert in particular are all suffering, en masse, from Stockholm Syndrome either. That would be letting them off the hook.
They are anti-Jewish hate mongers who use their positions to lie about Israel.
I believe Israel should be very selective about who they let in to cover Israel. Then when some reporter is granted access (or get the “Get” as they call it) they will be motivated not to report stuff that would be against Israeli interests.
“I believe Israel should be very selective about who they let in to cover Israel. Then when some reporter is granted access (or get the “Get†as they call it) they will be motivated not to report stuff that would be against Israeli interests. ”
sounds a whole lot like censorship to me… aren’t journalists supposed to be motivated to report the truth and the news, not something that is or is not against or in favor of Israeli interests? Not what I would evaluate as a step towards improving the way Israel is viewed.
I agree with Gene
Domestic Reporters are supposed to report during wartime whatever helps the war effort and not report anything that hurts it.
As for foreign reporters, if you limit them access sure first they will yell and scream and call Israel all kinds of names (how is that much different than now) but eventually they will bend over backwards to get the rare interview.
Look at how reporters treat Iran when they are granted rare access.
Reporters love the “bad boy”. And individual reporters love it when they they have access that other reporters aren’t granted.
“aren’t journalists supposed to be motivated to report the truth and the news, not something that is or is not against or in favor of Israeli interests?”
Yup, they are supposed to do that. I think the conference laid out many ways in which they don’t. I disagree that Israel should practice censorship. But when a journalist blatantly spreads propaganda and doesn’t even make a pretense of reporting both sides accurately, I would say it is justified to deny that reporter access. I also think domestic reporters shouldn’t be censored, but I have to wondrer why they are so hell-bent on showing Israel in the worst possible light when the truth is otherwise.
“aren’t journalists supposed to be motivated to report the truth and the news, not something that is or is not against or in favor of Israeli interests?â€
No, not during war time. When it comes to issues of national security they are supposed to report in a way that helps that effort.
Of course I am talking about citizens of the country who are journalists. Patriotism should come first.
Israeli journalists should have been more like Ernie Pyle and less like Joseph Goebbels.
Sure all the International news outlets love anti-Israeli news and providing anti-Israeli news is the quickest way for Israeli Journalists to advance their careers and gain accolades from the international journalistic community but shouldn’t patriotism come before one’s career?
I left this comment at Good Neighbours so I thought I’d drop it here too. Feel free to delete.
I’ve been reading the posts on the conference here and at Liza’s place and Yaeli’s and all the comments that have been made.
I’m conscious that Lisa said on some post or other that people outside Israel tend to make fools of themselves when commenting on what goes on there. I’m writing as a friend of Israel — though not an uncritical one — living in Australia, so I may well fall into that category.
That said, I want to say a couple of things in defence of Richard Landes and what I think was trying to be achieved in the holding of this conference.
Perhaps one thing we see more clearly than you do is how badly Israel is imaged in the international media, and the way that impacts the legitimacy of Israel in the court of (educated) public opinion. The relentless negativity seeps out from the media’s coverage into community perceptions, with all the implications for political support that entails. A while back, I said to my wife that I wanted to visit Israel some time in the near future. Why on earth, she asked? To show that I support Israel, I said. She paused: funny thing, that, she said thoughtfully; almost nobody else does.
Do you guys realise that ‘progressive’ public opinion in the west — and I think you would see yourselves as ‘progressive’, right? — has swung way, way over from opposing specific Israeli actions to supporting exterminationist programs? Do you realise that the broad left in the US, Australia and Europe has few problems and no apologies in absorbing classic anti-semitic tropes into its anti-Israel rhetoric? That tens of thousands of people world-wide rallied behind the Hizbollah flag during the July-August war, and chanted ‘Palestine will be free from the river to the sea’, fully aware that what they were calling for was the extirpation of Israel?
Israel’s supporters in the west have real problems with this. (I am sure Israel does too.) But because of the way Israel is routinely portrayed in the west — as a genocidal apartheid state by such luminaries as Jimmy Carter — we’re now a dwindling few. Not one in a hundred thousand who remember the media stories about massacres in Jenin knows that they were shown by the UN itself to be false. Not one in a hundred thousand who responded with revulsion to the media images of the deaths in Qana knows that rockets were fired from there into Israel, or that the recovery of the bodies was staged as a deliberate propaganda exercise. Not one in a hundred thousand who saw the stories about the attack on the Red Cross ambulances knows the stories were false. And virtually none of the millions who watched the ‘killing’ of Mohammed al Durah know the footage was faked. That’s the work that Richard Landes and others have been doing: to try and turn the lies and libels around.
I could not count the number of arguments I’ve had on the blogosphere here in Oz defending Israel, popularly described as ‘a self-contained axis of evil’. How many times I’ve pointed out that it is Israel that accepts a two-state solution, but that Hamas, Hizbollah (explicitly) and the Arab and Islamic states (implicitly — explicitly in Iran’s case, of course) do not. That Israel wants to live in peace with its neighbours, and the fanatics against whom it is ranged simply want to see it cease to exist. Hollow laughs all round, folks.
Richard Landes has been pointing these things out for a long time now. It was disturbing to see him castigated at Liza’s place. Maybe the conference played host to some fanatics on the Israeli side, though Landes was not one of them. But let’s be cautious of naivete. Perhaps if things were as they ought to be, the milk of human kindness would be just what it takes to resolve all the problems of the world. But that’s not the real world and some, inside Israel and outside, can recognise that.
Of course there are many good people on both sides, and it’s truly great to see sites like this one where they can come together and talk. But the men with the power and the guns don’t come here. And the chilling thought is that if they did, they would come here with one intention and one intention only.
Not the right kind of comment for Good Neighbours, I realise that. But Blogger doesn’t let me comment at Liza’s where this contribution more properly belongs.
“Domestic Reporters are supposed to report during wartime whatever helps the war effort and not report anything that hurts it.”
I disagree. A reporter must do his or her best to remain objective, especially during difficult times. If we go according to your statement, what the Reuters photographer did when he manipulated photos of the events in Qana was acceptable, as he was only “helping the war effort” for his country.
The same goes for American journalists covering the war in Iraq. These individuals have a duty to report all the news, not only the news that makes the US look good.
If we go according to your statement, what the Reuters photographer did when he manipulated photos of the events in Qana was acceptable, as he was only “helping the war effort†for his country.
Well there is a difference between not reporting something and lying about what you are reporting.
But still I guess from his perspective what he did was acceptable although from the perspective of Reuters they shouldn’t have allowed him to get away with it.
Patriotism should always come first. As for American journalists they should only report the news that makes the US look good.
A journalist’s job is to report the news - sometimes it’s good and sometimes it’s bad, but either way, it’s news, and objectivity is key in honest, respectable journalism. We’re not talking about passing secrets to the enemy here. What’s the point if we’re not getting the whole truth?
If American journalists could only report news that made the US look good, there’d be a lot of empty pages in the newspapers, I think…
You realize I meant American journalists should only report news that make the US look good in our wars, not other issues. And there are lots of good things going on regarding Iraq, but our News Media won’t report on them.
Patriotism should come first. Journalists shouldn’t be immune from that.
“A journalist’s job is to report the news - sometimes it’s good and sometimes it’s bad, but either way, it’s news, and objectivity is key in honest, respectable journalism. We’re not talking about passing secrets to the enemy here. What’s the point if we’re not getting the whole truth?”
That’s being a bit naive. It’s what journos say, not what they do. A journalist’s real job is not to get the news, but to get the stories. Bad news is a good story and good news is not a story at all. Truth? Not their department. Increasingly, these days, it’s the blogosphere’s.
Good point, Rob. Over the years, when friends/family (and the occasional stranger) abroad have commented on how dangerous it is to live in Israel, I’ve always pointed out that things aren’t as bad as they look, as nobody’s going to do a story about how “nothing has happened in Israel today”, so they only see and hear about the bad stuff. I do still stand by my original comment though, which you quoted (so I’m not going to quote it again). I believe that journalistic integrity is important, even if it’s not a trait that’s shared by all journalists. Maybe it is naive, but I still believe in stuff like that.
Journalistic integrity is important but not more important than patriotism. And I am not saying that one should lie, they should just not report stuff that is harmful to the war effort.