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Wednesday, February 06, 2013

Great article on media watchdogs (EoZ included)

No, that's not me.
The Jerusalem Report has a really nice article by Tibor Krausz about media watchdogs that look for anti-Israel bias. It can also be read in the Jerusalem Post.

It discusses most of the major players - CiFWatch, BBCWatch, Honest Reporting, Barry Rubin (although, inexplicably, not CAMERA) - and me:
Members of Fatah or Hamas known for their past involvement in terrorism and openly genocidal anti-Semitic views are often labeled “moderate” as long as they pay lip service to “the peace process.”

Meanwhile, Israelis who insist on reciprocal concessions from Palestinians in the land-for-peace scheme may end up being labeled “right-wing.”

“The common media labels include ‘Netanyahu is hawkish,’ ‘Abbas is a moderate,’ ‘Settlers are all religious fanatics,’ ‘Palestinians just want to harvest their olives in peace,’” a prolific American Jewish blogger who goes by the pseudonym Elder of Ziyon tells The Report.

...“[Many] journalists’ desire for peace often outweighs the evidence in front of them,” argues blogger Elder of Ziyon, an IT professional who often dissects news articles and op-eds about Israel on his site. “Hamas’s leaders call for the destruction of Israel in Arabic literally every day,” he says. “Yet a recent piece in The New York Times argued that they have accepted the two-state solution.

"The reporter didn’t have any quote that proved it, only quotes that he felt implied it.

"Journalists’ wishful thinking leads them to believe that both sides in the conflict have the same ethics and goals. That assumption is rarely true.”
My email interview for this was from last October. I had completely forgotten about it.

(h/t Emet)