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Another Gaza Media Moment
May 5th, 2008 by Bob Owens
Cross-posted at Confederate Yankee:
Three days ago, I contacted Associated Press Director of Media Relations Paul Colford, asking him about photos taken by AP photographer Khalil Hamra, in Beit Lahiya, a town in the northern Gaza Strip, on Monday, April 28, 2008.
The caption for one Hamra photo read as follows, without a hint of uncertainty:
A Palestinian woman reacts as she stands next to a house hit by an Israeli shell that killed a mother and her four children, in Beit Lahiya, northern Gaza Strip, Monday, April 28, 2008. An Israeli tank shell slammed into a tiny Gaza Strip home on Monday, killing a Palestinian woman and four of her children as they prepared to sit down for breakfast, officials and relatives said.
I asked Mr. Colford to “please acquire the other photos Mr. Hamra shot outside that home and send them to me… I should be able to tell which account is true by the simple differences between blast signatures of HEAT rounds used by Israel tanks impacting buildings, and the kind of blast that would be consistent with the Israeli account of a gunman carrying explosives that detonated.” Responding via email, Mr Colford suggested I should acquire the images somewhere else. It was a polite brush-off.
But the story told with such apparent certainty by Associated Press photographer Hamra and apparently deemed insignificant by Colford was never as certain as the media tried to make it sound.
An Israeli military inquiry into the incident has concluded that the family was indeed killed by a Palestinian militant’s explosives detonating. Tank shells were not fired into the home, a fact neither side now alledges. According to the IDF, a single airborne missile was fired from a drone at a cluster of four armed militants. How small was the missile? According to these video stills from an al Jazeera story, showing the missile’s impact point, quite small.
The “crater” according to al Jazeera.
A bemused civilian inspects the same missile “crater” as the reporter moves away.
Al Jazeera repeats Palestianian claims a that second missile was fired by the Israelis, but the visual evidence of the missile strike is not very convincing.
An alleged second missile “crater” outside the family home, estimated to be four inches deep.
As Noah Pollak pointed out in his Commentary story Factless in Gaza, “There is a deeper problem here: the manner in which news is gathered from Gaza, which has been inhospitable territory for western journalists for quite some time (remember what happened to Alan Johnston?). News organizations like the AP and Reuters rely, for their on-the-ground Gaza coverage, on Palestinian reporters and stringers whose objectivity and professionalism, to put it charitably, are in doubt.”
Adnan Hajj was by far the most obvious example of dishonest journalism by the Palestianian media as he manipulated images he sold to Reuters, but the facts are that the very essence of news reporting in the Gaza Strip and Lebanon are conducted primarily by reporters with a deep and personal interest in the stories they are reporting, often under the direction of terrorist groups that are not above “suggesting” stories and guiding media coverage with the barrel of a gun.
Internationally respected news organizations such as Reuters, AFP the Associated Press, and the BBC have proven themselves time and again to be very susceptible to being manipulated by agenda-driven journalists and photographers. Moreover, they seem not to care very much about passing along staged photos and biased information as long as it allows them to publish something. The news organizations will likely never admit it, hating Israel is big media business, and stories alleging that Israeli military forces are killing innocent Palestinians sell very well in the global media market.
As a result, initial reporting of this incident squarely places the blame for the blast on the Israeli military, without seriously looking for any other possible cause. It is both a business decision (these kinds of stories sell) and a practical one (unbiased reporting is not allowed by militant media handlers that guide and spy upon reporters and photographers).
That armed militants were moving among civilian homes for cover is never mentioned, and their argument that “it couldn’t have been our explosives, because I have some pictures of some explosives that didn’t blow up right over here” is readily digested with a degree of acceptance because there is no viable alternative.
Truly, truth is not an option.