Sunday, March 2, 2008

Reporting on Israel & Palestine

So, a Palestinian holocaust, eh? Why isn't this being talked about?

***

Recently, the lead article on the New York Times website was about the Israel-Gaza rocket exchange. (Before, the main photograph was an Israel's woman's response to Gaza's attack, but now it's a picture of a Palestinian child being buried.) The first thing that popped out to me was the actual chronology of the events and then the order of the events within the article. Israel did in fact fire first, but that's mentioned briefly in the third paragraph and then more bluntly in the eighth paragraph. In the lede, the journalist states that Gazans fired into Israel, but that was in reaction to the initial rockets launched by Israel. The same order of facts is reflected in other papers and news services like the AP.

Isn't the whole point of being a journalist is to report the facts and not mislead the readers?

Then, while making my daily news rounds, I noticed a similar article in the International Herald Tribune (which is owned by the New York Times) about the air strikes, written by the same person. The article covered the same, basic information as the NYT's article did, but the spin is different--the article doesn't have that same Israel-slant to it. Instead, she reports on what happened. So, we have the same writer covering the same event, but the stories are slightly different and are published by two different newspapers within the same company. Where did the difference happen?

1 comment:

Sadiq said...

thanks for pointing out. the spin as you mentioned is nothing but a witness of the media crisis of objectivity.