May 17, 2007
I haven't written about bias in the media - specifically against Israel - in quite a while. Maybe this is because Israeli politicians have been careful since Lebanon to restrain themselves... leaving the media with nothing to report on.
Maybe it's because Google News has become my main source of news, and I usually read three articles about any given subject to get as well-rounded a view on the subject as possible - letting the various biases cancel each other out - or call attention to each other & letting the facts seep through.
Today though, I came across an article in the New York Times that went too far in exhibiting the Times' persistent bias against Israel.
The headline read, "Fatah Officials' Home Stormed in Gaza Clashes"
The photograph was of destruction & a large crowd of Palestinians.
The photograph's caption read, "Palestinians searching for survivors after an Israeli missile strike on a building in Rafah, in the southern Gaza Strip today."
The first paragraph mentions that the Israeli air strike is just one aspect of the violence in Gaza, and then briefly mentions some of the factional fighting. Five paragraphs down the NYTimes finally indicate that the air strike was in retaliation for an increase in missiles raining down on the town of Sderot - which have injured many civilians.
The rest of the article basically focuses on the factional fighting between Hamas & Fatah. They even mention that Hamas militants killed five of their own "by accident" and shot at point-blank range seven Fatah police men.
If it's not clear where the bias is, I'll spell it out. The article was a total of 870 words. Except for maybe one paragraph, the article doesn't mention violence coming from Israel - the article focuses on the "factional violence" (which I'd call civil war). But, we all know what people look at first, in order to determine if they'll keep reading: the headline and the caption for the large photo at the top. Those three elements, in this case, point a bloody finger at Israel.
The headline doesn't indicate who stormed the Fatah Official's home (Hamas stormed it). But the image below the headline, and the caption below the image both discuss Israel's bombing of a "building" (a Hamas office).
At quick glance it's easy to assume that the building bombed by Israel in the image that the caption refers to is the home referred to in the title. Yet the bombing by Israel has nothing to do with the war Palestinians are waging on each other. Considering that the article is about Palestinians killing Palestinians, why is there an image and a caption of Israeli force?
The article can be found here...
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