Lisa has some insight into why so much of the foreign media coverage of Israel is so shoddy:
While standing in a tiny area reserved for the press, I struck up a conversation with a European photographer who had arrived in Israel three weeks previously. He had not yet been out of Jerusalem, and asked me about Tel Aviv. I told him that it’s very different from Jerusalem, gave him my card and told him to give me a call if he ever wanted a tour of my city. Don’t make the mistake that so many foreign journalists make, I told him, of getting stuck on the Jerusalem-Ramallah route. Israel is a lot more interesting and complicated than that.
Yes, he said, I heard that there’s a really big Jewish neighbourhood in Tel Aviv.
I laughed, then stopped when I saw that he wasn’t joking.
Um, listen, I said. That’s like saying you heard there’s a big black neighbourhood in Addis Ababa.
So maybe the journalists aren’t all pre-biased after all. Maybe they’re just too idiotic to know any better than to report the soundbytes that are fed to them on a silver platter. That would actually explain an awful lot.
‘Roland’ from Doonesbury (the cartoon strip) comes to mind.
Someone once told me there was a Polish neighbourhood…….in Warsaw!
Gosh! Do ya think it could be true?
Reminds me of an anecdote someone from the Israel press office related about while he was chaperoning Dan Rather’s team in Israel a couple of years ago. They were walking up the stairs to the rooves of the Jewish quarter for a newscast, and when Rather got to the roof and saw the Dome of the Rock, he said in a half-surprised tone, “Oh, I’ve been here before!”
I’ve lost my respect for reporters over the past decade. Journalism is virtually dead. Instead, the news is related to us by pretty talking heads who usually know little about the world and most of the issues they are reporting about.
People are so suckered from habit into believing what they see on the tv news or read in the paper, and don’t realize that these are the same dolts that they went to high school with and got smashed with in university too. The same people of our generation who copied homework from others, plagirized term papers, and also cheated on exams is who we rely on to tell us the truth.
I wish more people would be critical thinkers.
We know that ‘honestreporting’ has very, very valid claims about how the press report about the Israeli/Arab issue, so that kind of gets me thinking about how reliable they are in other hotspots as well like Iraq, Darfur, Africa, Balkans, etc…
That heavan’s for blogs! Over the past few years many people have been slowly dropping the MSM news sources.
Recently, for instance, I’ve let my subscription to The Globe lapse, and I no longer buy The Gazette on a regular basis
As for The Globe, any mainstream newspaper that hands prime editorial space to Wahabbi fanatics like Sheema Khan really doesn’t deserve to be read. If her, then why not Pat Robertson?
Wahabi fanatics like Sheema Khan! Or is it communist apparatchiks like Jeffrey Simpson! Or vegetarian terrorists like Margaret Wente!
Me, I don’t read MSM anymore, but I’m even more superiorer than you. I only get my news from the nut who hands out mimeographed rants on the street corner.
Sari — These anecdotes are fun. But it could also be that the media is right, that the reporters are reasonable, normal people. And that what they report is, more or less, what’s actually going on. Like Tom Cruise, You want the truth! You can’t handle truth!
Maybe its best to stick to the nuts on the street. Perhaps John should send me his streecorner rants.