Tag: media

Goodbye, NYT

You know, I don’t think I’ve read a single Thomas Friedman column since the NYT’s TimeSelect put it behind the paywall. I suspect that has led me to lead a healthier lifestyle, stopped my hairline from receding and increased my productivity by about 20%. Reading this Fisking of recent Friedman prose on the excellent Tabsir reminded me what I’m not missing. Over the recent weeks as I’ve practically given up on reading any of the New York Times because of how bad and biased their coverage of the war on Lebanon has been. (Just read the Angry Arab, who has been following it. I worry about his health.) My girlfriend just changed her homepage setting from the Times to the Post. I think now I will unsubscribe from their email alerts, and avoid reading it altogether. Apart from David Pogue’s technology column, anyway. That’s it: I will just think of NYT as a decent lifestyle publication, just ignore the news.

P.S. I heard they will be publishing a translation Bernard Henry-Levy’s moronic article in Le Monde this weekend. Classic: they publish him when he’s being saccharine about Israel even though they trashed him with glee for his book American Vertigo.

Hizbullah’s psy-ops in Israel?

Hossam beat me to posting about the great BBC article on Israeli psy-ops (the stuff about Al Manar’s satellite feed being hacked is especially fascinating, since they are all Arab or Iranian owned), but I will beat him at his own game:

Dozens of Israeli customers of the Orange cellular service provider received unexpected SMS messages on their phones Wednesday evening, with the English message:

“Now Now Now…Go out from your home Hizballah willing shelling of the area, Israel Government Cheating you And refuse recognition Defeat.”

It was not yet clear whether Hizbullah operatives were in fact behind the messages of intimidation, or whether the messages were no more than a joke in poor taste by other network subscribers.

. . .

Rani Rahav, a spokesperson for Orange, responded that the text messages were coming from a small service provider “somewhere out there in the Pacific Ocean. We are working right now to block the provider from transmitting further messages to Orange customers.”

This will be remembered in Israel as “the Micronesian betrayal.”

‘Shut up, you barefaced liar’

Here’s an article from Haaretz on the Arab journalists’ experiences in interviewing “the Israeli.� The interviewed journalists talk of mixed feelings between the need to be “professional� and letting out one’s own feelings about the subject he/she is covering. There is also the constant pressure from the viewers who expect from (and usually won’t accept anything but) the Arab journalist to “embarrass� and be critical of Israeli interviewees.

‘Shut up, you barefaced liar’
By Zvi Bar’el

“The war against Lebanon caught us completely unprepared,” an editor on Jordan’s television station told Haaretz. “All of us were focused on what was happening in Palestine or Iraq. I know that the majority of Arab stations, except for news channels like Al Jazeera and Al-Arabiya didn’t even have permanent correspondents in Lebanon after the completion of the Syrian withdrawal, and after the elections in May-June 2005.

“Lebanon wasn’t an object of interest. And then all of a sudden – war. How are we supposed to relate to it? How are we supposed to define Hezbollah? What is the official line we are supposed to take on the kidnapping of the Israeli soldiers? What vocabulary should we be using? Everything needed to be rethought. Even the system to which we answer didn’t quite know how to deal with it.” Yet now, even after a week and a half of warfare, no one on the Jordanian station seems too troubled by the fighting. The same is the case on the Libyan and Moroccan networks, and most especially so on the Iraqi network. After all, Iraq has a large daily dose of death, with numbers several times higher than those in Lebanon.

This war has also rekindled the question of what format the reporter’s interviews should take, and primarily how to relate to Israeli interviewees.

Continue reading ‘Shut up, you barefaced liar’

CPJ: Israel targeting TV crews in South Lebanon

Just got this:

LEBANON: TV crews allege targeting by Israeli warplanes in the south

New York, July 27, 2006—The Committee to Protect Journalists expressed concern today over allegations by several television crews that Israeli warplanes had attacked them, effectively shutting down live television coverage from southeast Lebanon.

Crews from four Arab television stations told CPJ that Israeli aircraft fired missiles within 80 yards (75 meters) of them on July 22 to prevent them from covering the effects of Israel’s bombardment of the area around the town of Khiam, in the eastern sector of the Israel-Lebanon border

“Israeli aircraft targeted in an air raid TV crews, especially Al-Jazeera, Al-Arabiya and Al-Manar,”said Ghassan Benjeddou, Al-Jazeera’s Lebanon bureau chief. “It’s a miracle that our crew survived the attack,” he told CPJ.

Continue reading CPJ: Israel targeting TV crews in South Lebanon

Arab, European and American media attitudes to war

Interesting note on Arab, European and American media attitudes to the war by Jonathan of the Head Heeb writing on Moorishgirl (ah, the incestuous world of liberal Middle East blogging!) I agree pretty much with his explanation, except that I don’t think the American media’s coverage, in Jonathan’s words, is supportive of Israel’s cause and tactics

because American thinking tends to conflate the concepts of just cause and just tactics. The default American opinion is that if someone starts a fight, the other party has the right to finish it by any means necessary, which means that to many Americans, the only significant fact is that Hizbullah struck the first blow.

There might be some insight about the American psyche there, but I would say the main reason is years of well-organized pro-Israel PR campaigns carried out by the main pro-Israel think tanks in DC (and the absence of equivalent pro-Arab think tanks) that has shaped much American political and media thinking about the Arab-Israeli conflict. And on top of that you have to add the not insignificant number of well-established, fundamentally pro-Israel publications in the US such as the New Republic, New York Sun, New York Post, Commentary, the Forward, and arguably the New York Times. This media reaction is not just the result of a “just desserts” attitude but the long-standing presence of almost automatically pro-Israel publications in the American media.

Angry Arab on Arab media coverage of war

The Angry Arab does a vitriolic round-up of the Arab (and especially Lebanese) media’s coverage of the war, as always bereft of paragraph breaks. (I think that adds to his madness.) I doubt his assertion that al-Manar is the most watched satellite news station in Morocco, though. Perhaps we’ll know soon as Morocco just got its first real media monitoring firm recently.