The human interest story that isn't interesting enough for the mainstream media

Deebo at Israellycool looks at some interesting statistics from the Israeli elections.

One of the facts reported is that the most pro-Likud town in Israel is the village of All Naim, where 77% voted Likud.

Al Naim is a Bedouin Arab town.

Why did they vote for Bibi? NRG went there and asked.

Until 1999 the Bedouin village was not known, and for years it waged a war against the Israeli authorities demanding recognition and minimum conditions for life such as electrical and sewage connections.

In the past two years things have changed dramatically. Now there is a paved main street half a mile long as well as other roads and construction of over 80 houses. This week a contractor began work for laying a sewer line. "Within a few months we will have a village sewer and electricity and we are pleased," says Nimer Naim, community leader.

Of of the main themes of this website is that bias is not only evident from what is said, but often even more so by what is unsaid.

Ken Roth of HRW didn't only spend his summer slamming israel, but the leader of  "human rights" organization studiously ignored nearly all of Hamas' human rights violations.

Leaders of NIF and J-Street strenuously claim to be "pro-Israel" yet they never say anything nice about Israel or defend it from its more strident critics.

Similarly, media bias is not only evident from the slanted stories that get reported, but from the complete absence of stories like these that go unreported.

The worst problem is the reluctance of the mainstream media to report anything negative about Mahmoiud Abbas or the PA, even when they make the most bigoted and hateful statements of support for terror or offer the most egregious lies.

This is because there is a meme of the "moderate Palestinians" that must be guarded, because the media is heavily invested in that falsehood.

The twin meme to that, of course, is that the Likud-led coalition government is racist and hates Arabs. It is practically an axiom.

That is why this story will not be reported. It fits every journalistic criterion of what would make a good human interest story, as it exposes something unusual and unexpected - but it goes against the meme of bigoted Bibi, and therefore cannot and must not be reported.

Once last year I listed about ten stories from a single week that the media ignored, even though - like this one - they matched every standard for newsworthiness.

The bias is not only from what is reported - it is much more obvious from what goes unreported.

(h/t Yoel, RealJerusalemStreets)