Robert Fisk on the CNN reporting of the Intifada in Palestine

From:
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/UK/Media/2000-11/reporting141100.shtml

The biased reporting that makes killing acceptable

By Robert Fisk

14 November 2000

When CNN's Cairo bureau chief, Ben Wedeman, was shot in a gun battle in
Gaza last month, I waited to hear how his employers would handle the
story. Having visited the spot where Wedeman was hit in the back, I
realised that the bullet must have been fired by Israeli soldiers at a
location on the other side of the nearest crossroads. So, what happened?
CNN reported that "most of the bullets" fired came from the Israelis, but
according to a pathetic response from a company spokesman in London  CNN
was not going to suggest who was to blame "at this time". Indeed not. The
American Associated Press news agency later reported  a real killer, this
one  that Wedeman had been "caught up in crossfire".

So much, I thought, for the 150 or so Palestinians shot dead by Israeli
troops over the past six weeks. If CNN didn't have the courage to tell the
truth about the shooting of its own reporter, what chance did the
Palestinians have? The latest shocking piece of American journalism
promises to be an "exclusive" on the American CBS network, whose 60
Minutes team has been given access to an Israeli army "re-enactment" of
the killing  by Israeli troops  of 12-year-old Mohamed al-Dura. The
picture of him cowering in the arms of his father and then collapsing dead
beside him has become an iconic image of the current conflict in the
Middle East.

The Israeli newspaper Ha'aretz, whose reporting of the battles outshines
anything appearing in the supine American press, has already quoted an
Israeli member of the Knesset, Ophir Pines-Paz, who complains that the
reconstruction sounds "fictitious" and like an attempt to "cover up the
incident by means of an inquiry with foregone conclusions... the sole
purpose of which is to clear the IDF of responsibility for Al-Dura's
death". Lobby groups in the United States, including a few brave American
Jews, are demanding to know why the CBS network is filming a partial
inquiry that is intended to prove that those who killed a little boy
didn't kill him  without, apparently, even asking the Palestinians for
their version of events.

It is all part of a familiar, weary pattern of biased reporting, which,
over the past few weeks, has started to become dangerous as well as deeply
misleading. The Israeli line  that Palestinians are essentially
responsible for "violence", responsible for the killing of their own
children by Israeli soldiers, responsible for refusing to make concessions
for peace  has been accepted almost totally by the media. Only yesterday,
a BBC World Service anchorman allowed an Israeli diplomat in Washington,
Tara Herzl, to excuse the shooting of stone-throwers  almost 200 of them
by Israeli soldiers on the grounds that "they are there with people who
are shooting". If that was the case  which it usually is not  then why
were the Israelis shooting the stone-throwers rather than the gunmen?

The murder of Israelis rightly receives much coverage. The killing of two
Israeli soldiers in Ramallah police station was filmed only through the
courage of one camera crew. The Palestinians did their best to seize all
picture coverage of the atrocity. Yet when an Israeli helicopter pilot
fired an air-to-ground missile at a low-ranking Palestinian militiaman on
Friday, it also killed two totally innocent middle-aged Palestinian women.
In its initial reports, BBC World Service Television reported that. Yet by
yesterday morning, the BBC was able to refer to the "assassination" of the
Palestinian without mentioning the two innocent women  58-year-old Azizi
Gubran and 55-year-old Arachme Shaheen  blown to pieces by the same
Israeli missile. They had been airbrushed from the story.

Then we have that old bugbear the "clash". Palestinians die "in clashes"
as if they are accidentally shot rather than targets for Israeli snipers.
The use of that word  and the opportunity it affords journalists of not
stating that Israelis killed them  is little short of a scandal. Take
Reuters' report from Jerusalem on 30 October by Howard Goller, which
referred to five Palestinians "wounded in stone-throwing clashes" and the
funerals of Palestinians "killed in earlier clashes". Yet, in a report on
the same day, Goller wrote of an Israeli shot dead by a "suspected
Palestinian gunman", while his colleague on Reuters, Sergei Shargorodsky,
referred to "Palestinian shooting attacks on Jewish settlements" and an
Israeli man stabbed to death, "presumably by Palestinians". Funny, isn't
it, how the responsibility for the killing of Israelis tends to be so
explicitly  and rightly  apportioned, while blame for the killing of
Palestinians is not?

But on we go, reporting the Middle East tragedy with all our own little
uncontroversial clichs and amnesia and avoidance of "controversial"
subjects. Such journalism is already leading  despite the extraordinary
casualty figures  to a public view that the Palestinians are solely
responsible for the bloodbath, that they are generically violent,
untrustworthy murderers. I think this kind of reporting helps to condone
the taking of human life.