[E-rundbrief] Info 1356 - Israel, Gaza and false balance in Media

[Matthias Reichl]

E-Rundbrief - Info 1356 - Peter Hart, FAIR (USA): Israel, Gaza and 
False Balance. Media construct a symmetry of violence where none exists.

Bad Ischl, 4.9.2014

Begegnungszentrum für aktive Gewaltlosigkeit

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Ähnliche Falschinformationen sind leider auch in vielen Massenmedien 
in der EU zu finden.

Matthias Reichl

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FAIR - Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting

Extra! Sep 01 2014
http://fair.org/extra-online-articles/israel-gaza-and-false-balance/

Israel, Gaza and False Balance

Media construct a symmetry of violence where none exists

By Peter Hart

Extra! cover, September 2014

Striving for a deceptive “balance,” US media miscast the devastating 
violence of Israel’s attacks on Gaza and obscured the lopsided nature 
of the death toll.

This started with the timeline preferred in much of the press. By most 
media accounts, the conflict started when three Israeli teenagers were 
kidnapped on June 12; their bodies were discovered on June 30. The 
Israeli government immediately declared Hamas responsible. Days after 
the discovery of the victims’ bodies, a Palestinian teenager was 
abducted and murdered by Israeli extremists, in what was called a 
“revenge” attack. Hamas rockets started falling in Israel, and 
“Operation Protective Edge” was Israel’s response.

This narrative of Israeli response to Palestinian aggression was set 
from the beginning: “Striking back. Israel hitting hard overnight with 
34 precision airstrikes on a Hamas compound,” declared ABC World News’ 
Alex Marquardt (7/1/14). A USA Today editorial (7/15/14) explained 
that the war started when “Hamas began its latest round of mostly 
ineffectual rocket attacks on Israel.”

But this chain of events is dubious. “Operation Brother’s Keeper”—the 
Israeli response to the abduction—resulted in mass arrests in the West 
Bank, including Hamas officials, and killed five Palestinians. The 
declaration that Hamas was responsible for the abduction and 
killings—often treated as a fact in news coverage—was never firmly 
established, as the suspects were militants well-known for operating 
in defiance of Hamas leadership (FAIR Blog, 7/28/14).

The Hamas rockets that Israel, in the conventional timeline, was 
“striking back” against were fired in response to an Israeli airstrike 
that killed a Hamas leader, Israeli officials told the Times of Israel 
(6/30/14); these were the first rockets fired by Hamas since 2012, the 
officials said.

Nor is it clear why the chronology should begin with the three Israeli 
teens killed in June, and not with two Palestinian teens shot to death 
by Israeli soldiers in May while protesting the expulsion of 
Palestinians from Israel (B’Tselem, 4/20/14). The two were among 84 
Palestinian minors killed by Israeli security forces in the last five 
years, according to B’Tselem, an Israeli human rights monitor.

Israel’s previous assaults on Gaza—most notably “Operation Cast Lead,” 
which killed 1,391 Palestinians, mostly noncombatants, including 318 
children, in 2008–09 (B’Tselem, 1/1/11)—were mostly down the media 
memory hole. The land, air and sea blockade that Israel has maintained 
against Gaza since 2007 was likewise seldom mentioned, even though 
blockades are generally regarded as acts of war.

But the desire to start the clock with Palestinian aggression and 
Israeli retaliation is a familiar media framing of the conflict (FAIR 
Action Alert, 4/4/02))—“Palestinian militants continue firing rockets 
into Israel, whose air force answers with precision airstrikes,” as 
ABC World News (7/4/14) put it. “The response by Israel was quick and 
powerful,” NBC anchor Brian Williams (7/1/14) declared.

Also familiar was what came next—an obvious effort to “balance” 
coverage to show suffering on both sides, despite the obvious fact 
that the suffering was overwhelmingly occurring on one side. (At the 
end of July, 275 times as many civilians had been killed in Gaza as in 
Israel—Intercept, 7/29/14.)

Nightly newscasts were often split between correspondents in Gaza and 
Tel Aviv, reporting on the mood in both places—and conveying Israeli 
fear was often foregrounded. On the NBC Nightly News (7/8/14), 
Williams narrated:

     As the skies over Israel have lit up tonight, sirens have sounded 
and Israelis have been told they have between 15 seconds and one 
minute to run to shelter and avoid rockets launched by Hamas.

NPR host Robert Siegel (7/8/14) posed this question to correspondent 
Ari Shapiro: “How is this affecting living in southern Israel, and, 
for that matter, in Gaza?”

Shapiro spent 120 words on the stress experienced by Israelis — how 
long it takes to get to a bomb shelter, and what one family felt when 
sirens go off when they’re sitting down for lunch. Gaza got 41 words, 
a reference to an NPR producer living amid airstrikes that were 
actually killing entire families.

USA Today had a similar piece (7/9/14) headlined “In Shadow of Fear in 
Israel, Gaza.” The paper leads with the story of a clerk in an Israeli 
toy store who was remaining behind the counter as the warning sirens 
blared. The headline placed this situation on the same level with what 
was happening in Gaza, where “more than two dozen Palestinians were 
killed and scores injured from Israeli airstrikes.”

ABC's Diane Sawyer (7/18/14) misidentified this Palestinian victim of 
Israeli attacks as an Israeli victim of Palestinian attacks.

The desire for “balance” may have been what led ABC World News anchor 
Diane Sawyer (7/8/14) to make one of the most widely criticized errors 
of the conflict, narrating over a scene of devastation: “Here, an 
Israeli family trying to salvage what they can, one woman standing 
speechless among the ruins.” The photos were of Palestinians, as 
Sawyer acknowledged in an on-air correction (7/11/14). The level of 
destruction shown in the pictures was not evident anywhere in Israel.

But in corporate media that were continually treating the threat to 
Israelis as comparable to what was being experienced in Gaza, such 
mistakes are hardly an accident. Consider the opening of the newscast 
in question, where Sawyer declared: “On the brink: Rockets raining 
down on Israel. The Israelis trying to blast them out of the sky 
before they hit.” If one’s understanding of the conflict centered on 
rockets “raining down on Israel,” one is bound to assume that this 
“rain” causes significant damage.

There was often an implied military symmetry in coverage as well. 
“Israel and Hamas Trade Attacks as Tension Rises” was the New York 
Times headline (7/8/14) over a story that began: “Israel and Hamas 
escalated their military confrontation on Tuesday, with Israel 
carrying out extensive air attacks in response to heavy rocket fire.”

The same day’s Wall Street Journal front page (7/8/14) announced 
“Israel, Hamas Escalate Violence,” and led with the Palestinian 
escalation: “Palestinian militants in the Gaza Strip unleashed their 
most far-reaching rocket attack ever on major Israeli population centers.”

On NPR’s All Things Considered (7/8/14), host Siegel told listeners, 
“Both Israel and the Palestinian militant group Hamas intensified 
their attacks today.” Correspondent Ari Shapiro noted that “Israel’s 
military had said it had fired on 150 targets in Gaza, in response to 
160 rockets being fired from Gaza towards Israel.”

But if citing the total number of attacks was intended to send the 
message that both sides were equally culpable in committing violence, 
the wide disparity in the death toll would be a sign that such 
“balance” is not a proper journalistic goal—if it leads to the 
sacrifice of truth.
Bob Schieffer, Benjamin Netanyahu

CBS's Bob Schieffer (7/13/14) thought the sirens during his interview 
with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu would bring the war 
home to Americans - rather than the hundreds of Palestinians Netanyahu 
has killed.

One might conclude from such coverage that corporate media value some 
human lives more than others. And some media figures, in fact, made it 
clear that they feel this way.

On CBS’s Face the Nation (7/13/14; FAIR Blog, 7/15/14), host Bob 
Schieffer repeatedly expressed concern for Israeli civilians who felt 
threatened, saying that the war “really came home to a lot of 
Americans” when they heard rocket warning sirens during his interview 
with Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. The hundreds of 
Palestinians who had been killed at that point did not provoke 
Schieffer to express any sympathy—or to imagine that “a lot of 
Americans” might be pained by those deaths as well.

Two weeks later (7/27/14), he explained his worldview more fully:

     The Palestinian people find themselves in the grip of a terrorist 
group that has embarked on a strategy to get its own children killed 
in order to build sympathy for its cause, a strategy that might 
actually be working, at least in some quarters.

Schieffer found comfort in a quote he attributed to former Israeli 
leader Golda Meir: “We can forgive the Arabs for killing our children… 
but we can never forgive them for forcing us to kill their children.”

Schieffer’s attribution of the 226 children killed by Israel as of 
July 27 (UNOCHA .org, 7/27/14) to a Hamas “strategy to get its own 
children killed” that was “forcing [Israel] to kill their children” 
might seem like a bizarre, not to say racist, form of projection. But 
it is just an extreme expression of the media’s diminishment of 
Palestinian life. Schieffer made his priorities clear elsewhere in the 
show, telling Netanyahu that while

     many people agree with and sympathize with your determination to 
stop these attacks on your people…they are also worried that every 
time the world sees these pictures of these children being hurt and 
killed, that you may be losing the battle for world opinion.

To Schieffer, Palestinian suffering is bad because it harms Israel’s 
image. It follows, then, that the less the media show of it, the better.

SIDEBAR When Headlines (Don’t) Tell the Story

Headlines are supposed to convey the essence of a news story, but 
often they served to obscuring the reality of the crisis in Gaza. A 
Reuters dispatch (7/8/14) reported the news that 23 Palestinians were 
killed—17 of them civilians—under the headline “Hamas Rockets Land 
Deep in Israel as It Bombards Gaza Strip.”
New York Times, Gaza

Victims of an Israeli airstrike on a Gaza beach.

When an Israeli missile struck a beachside cafe where a crowd had 
gathered to watch a World Cup match, the New York Times (7/10/14) went 
with the Web headline “Missile at Beachside Gaza Cafe Finds Patrons 
Poised for World Cup.” Many readers were alarmed at the idea that a 
missile might “find” a group of civilians; the headline was eventually 
changed to “In Rubble of Gaza Seaside Cafe, Hunt for Victims Who Had 
Come for Soccer.”

But if there was a lesson learned, the Times had a funny way of 
showing it. Just a few days later, the paper ran a dramatic account of 
the killing of 4 young boys on a Gaza beach. The initial 
headline—“Four Young Boys Killed Playing on Gaza Beach”—was apparently 
too precise, since it was later altered to “Boys Drawn to Gaza Beach, 
and Into Center of Mideast Strife.” Times public editor Margaret 
Sullivan (7/22/14) brought the complaints to editor Dean Baquet, who 
explained that while online headlines tend to be direct, the print 
versions are “a little poetic and written in the context of the whole.”

Poetry can come at a price, though. “Loss of Shelter and Electricity 
Worsens a Crisis for Fleeing Gazans,” read a July 30 headline. Homes 
and power plants were not “lost,” of course—they were destroyed by 
Israeli bombing. -P.H.

Extra! September 2014

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