Pages

Thursday, February 03, 2011

Guardian defends its "Palestine Papers" coverage

In the Jewish Chronicle, the Guardian defends itself against the accusations that their coverage of the Palestine Papers was biased and anti-Israel.

I think the record speaks for itself - the Guardian and Al Jazeera misinterpreted and misrepresented the papers to put Israel in the worst possible light, and they weren't above lying to do so.

But I found this part of their defense curious:

Examining the haul of 1600 documents, there were a number of passages that the Guardian's team of reporters agreed are highly significant.
These included the offer by Palestinian negotiators – in the context of an overall peace agreement – that Israel would annex all but one of the settlements in East Jerusalem. PLO negotiators also agreed to a remarkably low number of returning refugees.
These are two of the stories we ran, and almost a week after the rest of the world's media gained access to the documents – all of which are now publicly available – no one has found a major story that we missed. We were led, in other words, by the source material. It is no surprise that the majority of the stories concern the PLO, as most of the documents come from the PLO's negotiations unit.

I've been searching for the entire set of documents since the story broke. At the Guardian website, only 26 of the documents are available - no new ones since January 26th. I similarly cannot find a list of all the documents at Al Jazeera.

So the Guardian is claiming that they only highlighted the papers that are newsworthy, and they bring as proof that no one else has found any newsworthy papers - when they can't be found!

I would prefer to decide for myself what is newsworthy, thank you very much. (I've been doing that with Wikileaks.) Let the Guardian put all 1600 documents on their site and then we can truly decide.

UPDATE: Found them. I'll see if there is anything else newsworthy.