The massacre that wasn?t
I found this interesting. It's about how the European press manufactured the "Massacre of Jenin"
<a href="http://www.upi.com/view.cfm?StoryID=20052002-032952-3644r"; target="_blank">Part One: Documenting the Myth</a>
By Martin Sieff
UPI Senior News Analyst
Published 5/20/2002 7:02 PM
WASHINGTON, May 20 (UPI) -- After the Israeli Army launched its retaliatory strike into the Palestinian Authority-ruled West Bank in early April, the international media was filled with reports that the Israelis had possibly or probably killed hundreds, even thousands, of Palestinian civilians. The reports were later disproved and even the PA itself revised its own official figure for Palestinans killed in the fierce fighting down to only 56.
Here, United Press International traces the course of this "media myth" and the reasons it became so influential and was so widely believed.
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The U.S. and Western European media coverage of the Battle of Jenin last month raises troubling and far-reaching questions about the reliability of the modern mass media and press in conflict situations. And the answers to them are both complex and surprising.
After the Israeli Army attacked the West Bank Palestinian city of Jenin on April 2, the Western European media fell for the "Massacre Myth" in Jenin in a big way. Even though the final Palestinian Authority figure acknowledged only 56 dead in Jenin, media coverage in major Western European nations gave credence to early claims by the PA's top officials that as many as 3,000 civilians had been killed in the fighting there.
Israel's own actions led credence to the myth. The Israeli army barred the international media from Jenin as its forces drove into the city. The only sources that the media then had for what was going on there were from the Palestinians themselves. And in the inevitable confusion of battle, what the great 19th century military theoretician Carl von Clausewitz called "the fog of war" applied. At the time, both the Israeli and Palestinian authorities appeared unclear what was actually happening on the ground.
However, even allowing for these factors, the Western media coverage of Jenin, espically in the Western European press and broadcast media, largely proved to be factually wildly inaccurate in the light of what later emerged. And there was also a hysterical tone to many of them.
What made these unreliable and misleading reports all the more remarkable was that many of the worst of them emerged in the most respected and influential organizations in the British media. The British Broadcasting Corporation and three of the four so-called "quality" daily newspapers -- The Times, The Independent and The Guardian -- fell for the "Massacre Myth" hook, line and sinker. Even the more cautious and -- as it proved -- reliable "Daily Telegraph" was not entirely immune either.
On April 17, the left wing "Guardian" in an editorial drew a moral equivalence between the Israeli drive on Jenin -- which itself was in response to an unprecedented series of suicide bomb massacres of Israeli civilians -- and the mega-terrorist attacks on the United States of Sept. 11. The Israeli retaliatory operation was "every bit as repellent" as the hijacked airliner attacks that killed nearly 3,000 Americans in New York City, the Guardian proclaimed.
Janine di Giovanni, the "Times" of London's correspondent in Jenin, reported on April 16, "Rarely in more than a decade of war reporting from Bosnia, Chechnya, Sierra Leone, Kosovo have I have seen such deliberate destruction, such disrespect for human life." In terms of what was later confirmed to have actually happened, this amounted to a whopper of mis-reporting comparable to Walter Duranty's claim in The New York Times that there was no famine in the Ukraine from 1929 to 1932. In fact, 10 million Ukrainian peasants starved to death then. Duranty won a Pulitzer Prize for his (mis-)reporting.
Di Giovanni's comparison also inevitably called into question what she had actually seen in Chechnya, Bosnia and Sierra Leone if she really imagined that the death toll in Jenin was worse than any of them. At least 100,000 people are believed to have died in Russia's two wars of 1994-96 and of 1999 to the present to crush Chechen separatists. As many as 250,000 people were killed in the 1991-95 Bosnia war and many mass graves of slaughtered entire towns and villages have been discovered and excavated. Scores of thousands died in the chaotic civil wars of Sierra Leone. Yet the documented death toll in Jenin was soon established as being literally one thousand times smaller than in Bosnia and Chechnya.
Other British papers shared in the hysteria. Phil Reeves in the London Independent compared Jenin to the Killing Fields of Pol Pot's Cambodia where between 1 million to 3 million people were slaughtered from 1975 to 1978. Analysts later noted that many of these reports were openly one-sided. Reeves did not cite or quote a single Israeli source in his story. Other claims, such as the one that hundreds of Palestinian victims were buried by an Israeli bulldozer in mass grave, later proved to have no validity or verification whatsoever.
The BBC uncritically swallowed the Massacre Myth. BBC News headlined a report on April 18 as "Jenin 'Massacre' Evidence Growing," and the Guardian newspaper's headline on a May 6 analysis piece as "How Jenin Battle Became a Massacre." The BBC report said an Amnesty International investigation "has only just begun, but Palestinian claims of a massacre were gaining foundation."
The claim that Israel had committed war crimes proved to be a popular one. Reeves' story in The Independent on April 16 was headlined "Amid the Ruins, the Grisly Evidence of a War Crime," and he wrote: "A monstrous war crime that Israel has tried to cover up for a fortnight has finally been exposed." The Guardian on April 17 zeroed in on Gerald Kaufman, a Labor member of Parliament and a prominent leader in the British Jewish community, calling Ariel Sharon a "war criminal" and accusing the Israeli prime minister of "ordering his troops to use methods of barbarism against the Palestinians."
However, by the end of April, the hysteria was dying down in the British press as U.S. media reporting established that the earlier wild accusations and accounts had no validity. On April 29, the BBC interviewed military expert David Holley who concluded on the basis of the evidence by then available: "It just appears there was no wholesale killing." Holley went on to conclude, "I think massacre is a word that is too often used in these situations and it doesn't really help."
In Italy, while coverage of Jenin was still widely distorted, the hysteria and inaccuracy proved far less sweeping than in London. Instead, it broke down much more predictably along left-wing party lines, reflecting each newspaper's editorial stance and political leanings.
Il Manifesto, a left-wing newspaper and the former mouthpiece of the Italian Communist Party, said in a special Jenin-related package in its May 4 edition that the United Nations was "frightened of taking a stand in Jenin" and that Israel's actions in Jenin could be taken as war crimes.
Similarly, La Repubblica, the main center-left paper, had covered the topic with a general anti-Israel stance. That was criticized by the May 7 issue of Il Foglio, a small but powerful intellectual paper on the right that is edited by an ally of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.
Il Foglio ran a whole issue blasting La Repubblica's coverage, saying the paper gave a "twisted view of reality," especially taking issue with a banner headline La Repubblica ran on April 10 reading "Massacre in Jenin." In several issues, La Repubblica made the events in Jenin sound Holocaust-like, using words like "apocalyptic" and "historical." One story on April 28 that discussed the U.N. fact-finding mission, for example, was buried inside, while scathing stories blasting the Israelis were on the front.
The pro-business newspaper Il Sole/24 Ore proved much more evenhanded and reserved in its dealings with the subject than the left wing ones. For example, on April 7, the paper said in an editorial that it is impossible to get accurate news from Jenin but that "circumstantial evidence ... (seemed) to indicate a potential massacre."
Another story on April 9 quoted conflicting witnesses who said that the victims numbered in the hundreds and those who said there were around three dozen. In May, the paper ran at least two editorials complaining about "irresponsible" media coverage.
Although there was exaggerated and inaccurate reporting in the French press, serious newspapers tended to keep more of a balance than their opposite numbers in London.
The respected daily Le Monde on April 13 reported that the Israeli army had acknowledged that hundreds of people were "wounded and killed" in the Jenin refugee camp. It also reported that at least 23 Israeli soldiers had been apparently killed.
Three days later, on April 16, Le Monde again refused to be swept away by the mounting hysteria. The paper concluded, "It was still impossible Monday to confirm or deny Palestinian accusations that Tsahal (the Israeli Defense Forces) committed a 'massacre' in the camp of 15,000 refugees." On May 5, the paper stated in an editorial, "Nothing permits thinking that the Israeli army perpetuated massacres in Jenin." However it did then echo Human Rights Watch and other groups in suggesting Israel had committed war crimes there.
Even the leftist newspaper Liberation in an editorial on April 16 advised caution in dealing with the allegations.
"Up till now, nothing proves the existence of such crimes. One cannot brush (such accusations) aside - Israel is blocking all serious inquiries. [But] that is not a reason to decree them a-priori," the newspaper commented.
Liberation then recommended a lesson many other major Western European news organizations and even governments would have done well to emulate: "It is a sad diplomacy that can't distinguish facts from propaganda, even in a region where this mix is a sort of rule."
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This report was based on the reporting of Al Webb in London, Elizabeth Bryant in Paris and Eric Lyman in Rome.
Next: Part Two: Why the Massacre Myth was Believed.
Copyright © 2002 United Press International
<a href="http://www.upi.com/view.cfm?StoryID=21052002-123835-3473r"; target="_blank">Analysis: Why Europeans bought Jenin myth</a>
By Martin Sieff
UPI Senior News Analyst
Published 5/21/2002 3:14 PM
WASHINGTON, May 21 (UPI) -- After the Israeli Army launched its retaliatory strike into the Palestinian Authority-ruled West Bank in early April, the international media was filled with reports that the Israelis had possibly or probably killed hundreds, even thousands, of Palestinian civilians. The reports were later disproved and even the Palestinian Authority itself revised its own official figure for Palestinians killed in the fierce fighting down to 56.
Here, United Press International traces the course of this "media myth" and the reasons it became so influential and was so widely believed.
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Most of the major press and broadcasting outlets in Western Europe uncritically gobbled up the Jenin Massacre Myth with self-indulgent abandon. Their record contrasted particularly unfavorably -- and even, it might be argued, contemptibly -- with the remarkable balance and restraint the U.S. broadcast and print media showed after Sept. 11.
The mega-terrorist attacks that destroyed the World Trade Center towers and mauled the Pentagon killed around 3,000 Americans in New York City and Washington. Yet U.S. media coverage and reaction was remarkable for its balance and restraint. There was no effort to scapegoat the Muslim population of the United States -- estimates of its size run from 1.7 million to 7 million but it appears to be between 2 million to 3 million.
Careful distinctions were drawn repeatedly between the small number of terrorists who had actually planned and executed the attacks and the vast majority of law-abiding Muslim Americans.
By contrast, the Israeli strikes into the West Bank did not threaten French, British or other Western Europeans directly. Yet much of the coverage was exaggerated, wildly inaccurate and reflected a sweeping rush to judgment against an entire nation and the ethic group that identified with it.
Alon Ben-David, veteran military correspondent of the Israel Broadcasting Authority and currently a media fellow at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard told United Press International: "A large part of the European media regards itself as not just reporters but as ideological crusaders. They are in the business of journalism not just for the business. They want to do good in the world. They have agendas."
And in the case of the initial massacre accusations, many of these Western European reporters "had no way of verifying the allegations they heard yet they reported them as fact, or as factually credible. That bothers me," Ben-David said.
Why were reporters and news editors of so many of the biggest and most prestigious Western European newspapers and broadcasting networks ready to believe that the Israeli Army had committed a massacre in the Palestinian West Bank city of Jenin when no massacre had in fact occurred? The reasons were many.
First, everyone was prepared to believe the worst, because the worst had already happened. It was all too credible to believe that hundreds, if not thousands, of Palestinians had been massacred in Jenin because they had been massacred before. The 20-year-old shadow of Sabra and Shatila lay across the international media's initial perceptions of Jenin.
In 1982, Lebanese Christian Falangist forces allied to the invading Israeli army massacred at least hundreds, possibly thousands, of Palestinian civilians in the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila outside Beirut. Large numbers of women and children were among the dead. The Israeli forces did not commit the massacre or even encourage it, but a later major national inquiry in Israel issued devastating criticism of Israel's then-minister of defense, Ariel Sharon. It concluded that Sharon had not taken the precautionary action required by the warning signs and circumstances to prevent the massacre. It recommended that he never again be allowed to serve as defense minister of Israel.
The effect of Sabra and Shatila on the journalists covering it was profound. Its impact through them on the Western world, especially in Europe, was even greater. From Israel's war of independence in 1947-48 for more than 30 years through the 1967 Six Day War, the 1973 Yom Kippur War and the 1976 Entebbe rescue operation, Israel enjoyed enormous sympathy and support among the Western European media elite. Reporters, editors and their readers alike all saw it as a Jewish David struggling to survive against an Arab Goliath.
But after Sabra and Shatila, all that changed. Then, the first Palestinian uprising, or Intifada, of 1987-92 reinforced the Sabra and Shatila image that the Palestinians had replaced the Jews as an "eternally suffering" people. That image and stereotype remained, though somewhat submerged, during the hopeful years from the start of the Oslo Peace Process in 1993 to its collapse at the Camp David II summit in July 2000.
Because Sabra and Shatila had actually happened, it appeared credible that it could happen again. Because Ariel Sharon had failed to prevent Sabra and Shatila, it was easy to imagine that he had approved a second version of it on a large scale. These preconceptions proved critical in the willingness of media elites to accept the Palestinian allegations that a massacre was taking place.
Second, the Israelis haplessly and inadvertently dug a public relations trap for themselves and then promptly fell into it. They prevented the international media from covering what was certainly extremely fierce fighting in the refugee camp and streets of Jenin.
As a result, international media reporters could not see with their own eyes that a massacre in fact was not taking place. But they were receiving claims from the Palestinians that it was. And since the Israeli military were preventing the international media from going into Jenin and seeing what was happening with their own eyes, it was only too easy and obvious to conclude that they were covering up the truth of the Palestinian allegations.
Third, even when the worst fighting was over and the Israelis finally allowed reporters into Jenin, a "rat pack" psychology, even hysteria, appears to have taken hold. People saw what they wanted to see and they mutually reinforced each other in their perceptions. Thus it was that an astonishing number of reports of alleged massacres and atrocities in the different "quality" newspapers of the British press alike cited the same single Palestinian eyewitness for their allegations.
Fourth, almost none of those present had covered serious urban conflicts in Lebanon and Northern Ireland during their worst phases in the 1970s and early 1980s. Almost none of them were old enough to have experienced full-scale battle reporting first-hand in Vietnam. This led them to vastly exaggerate the scale of destruction and death they were seeing. One British reporter wrote evocatively of the stench of hundreds of dead bodies buried beneath the rubble when the Palestinian Authority, which had earlier claimed thousands had died, had revised its own official figures of those killed to less than 60.
Janine di Giovanni writing in the London Times even claimed the devastation was on a worse scale than anything she had seen in Bosnia, Chechnya or Sierra Leone, where scores, even hundreds, of thousands of people had died. The reactions of veteran reporters of real wars like Ernie Pyle or Marguerite Higgins to that kind of hyperbole would likely have been derisive laughter.
The reaction of the Western European media differed profoundly in its nature from that of U.S. newspapers and broadcasting news outlets. The allegations were equally widely reported in the United States. However, the U.S. broadcast media proved far more resistant to anti-Israeli and even anti-Semitic hysteria than that in Western European. This appears to have been the case precisely because no single state-funded or state-approved corporation dominated broadcast news in the United States, as is the case in Britain and France.
In those and other smaller countries, a well-entrenched left-wing media elite has been hostile to Israel and its policies for decades. And they have long enjoyed a cozy, unchallenged bureaucratic dominance in the state broadcasting news organizations that to a large degree set the braking news and analysis for the entire print press.
Therefore, entire echelons of editors and executives in these organizations were willing to accept uncritically the fierce unsubstantiated and hysterical reports coming out of their correspondents in Jenin. And even when individual newspapers like Le Monde in Paris or Il Foglio in Rome expressed caution or skepticism about the initial massacre claims, their warnings were drowned out in the broadcast media din. In the United States, by contrast, there is no single state-owned or subsidized national broadcasting service to set the tone.
There are four main national television networks, each one corporately or privately owned and three of them also run quasi-independent cable news networks. And there is also CNN. The cable Fox News Channel in particular seeks to position itself as relatively conservative in tone and counter-channel to the other, more liberal, "establishment" ones. With this diversity of broadcast voices, it is therefore not possible for a single network to dominate the coverage. Coverage perceived as being slavishly biased in favor of -- or against -- either Israel or the Palestinians tends to provoke strong outcries from public pressure groups and on other parts of the media.
In addition to all this, the raw material being reported from the field tended to be far more partisan and sympathetic to the Palestinian initial claims of massacre in Western Europe than in the United States. For the tradition of the practice of journalism in Europe remains far more partisan and unashamedly subjective than in the United States. The reasons for the European media's "rush to judgment" over Jenin were many, but one conclusion was inescapable: The "rush to judgment" was an "hour of shame."
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Next: Who Won and Who Lost?
<a href="http://www.upi.com/view.cfm?StoryID=22052002-085307-9694r"; target="_blank">How Europe's media lost out</a>
By Martin Sieff
UPI Senior News Analyst
Published 5/22/2002 10:00 AM
WASHINGTON, May 22 (UPI) -- After the Israeli army launched its retaliatory strike into the Palestinian Authority-ruled West Bank in early April, the international media was filled with reports that the Israelis had possibly killed hundreds, even thousands, of Palestinian civilians. The reports were disproved and even the PA revised its official figure for Palestinians killed in the fierce fighting to 56. Here, United Press International traces the course of this "media myth" and the reasons it became so influential and was so widely believed.
Third of three parts
The U.S and Western European media covered the Jenin "Massacre That Wasn't" in radically different ways over the past month. The American media came out way on top and the European media, especially state-run broadcasting outlets, came out by far the losers.
This was not an anticipated outcome on either side of the Atlantic. It was, in fact, a further humiliation for Western European governments and left-leaning media leaders. They were already reeling from the humiliations of seeing a virtual fascist make the last two in France's presidential election and the assassination of radical political leader Pim Fortuyn in The Netherlands. That was the kind of violent political outburst that most Western Europeans have long comfortably believed could only happen in America, not to them.
Not every press or news organizations in Western Europe came out badly from the controversy over what the Israeli army did or did not do in Jenin. Media outlets like the London Sunday Times, Il Foglio in Rome and Le Monde in Paris that refused to be swept away by the hysteria gained in credibility greatly.
Even other media outlets like The Guardian of London newspaper or the Associated Press in the United States that at first reported the exaggerated claims, but then took care to present the counter evidence when it came in, showed their basic integrity. Papers like the London Times and Independent, which did not do remotely as much as The Guardian in running pieces documenting their own, and others, factual failings, fared far less well.
The affair of the Jenin "Massacre Myth" did not debunk the basic credibility of the Western media. The truth emerged at the end of the day. But the U.S. media overall were winners by far at the expense of the Western European ones.
Time magazine's in-depth reporting, for example, proved to be by the end of the day a model of how to reconstruct complex events far away under the pressure of intensely tight bylines. Its May 13 reconstruction of the battle of Jenin is likely to prove a major resource for future historians
The credibility of state-run or supported national broadcasting organizations took a huge hit. The principle of having a free market in broadcasting as well as print media outlets in order to ensure more fair and balanced overall coverage got a big boost. This was humiliating to the Europeans, who have long sneered in their dominant broadcast media culture at what they regard as the crass commercialism and vulgar pursuit of profits of competing U.S. broadcasting networks.
It was also a blow to those who would like to expand National Public Radio's small-scale radio news operation in the United States into a radio-TV news empire on the lines of the BBC or other European outlets. The reporters and editors of NPR appeared far more prone to swallow the wild allegations about Jenin than most of their U.S. media colleagues did.
The controversy also underlined the value of having widely read and circulated columnists who can act in the media like the Senate does in Congress or other "upper" houses of parliament do in Western Europe and Japan. Such columnists at their best can act like deliberative parliamentary chambers not subject to the pressures of repeated re-election campaigns. They can take a longer term view of things. They can act as cautious, more thoughtful voices expressing caution or doubt about emotional hysteria sweeping the news pages. William F. Buckley's May 4 editorial "Did the Israelis Do It?" serves as a model for this kind of writing.
Some European columnists did not do nearly so well. A.N. Wilson's willingness in the London Evening Standard to accuse the Israelis, without any credible evidence, of poisoning Palestinian water supplies showed the way columnists could break every restraint of decency and common sense. Wilson's article would have been at home in the pages of the Nazi propaganda sheet "Der Sturmer."
The U.S. and Western European media coverage of the Jenin Massacre Myth raises troubling and far-reaching questions about the reliability of mass media and press in conflict situations.
The practice of war reporting is a dirty, complicated business at the best of times. War, as wise figures from Carl Von Clausewitz to the fictional Capt. James T. Kirk of "Star Trek" have repeatedly noted, is a messy, unsure business. War is chaos incarnate both for those who wage it and for those who cover them. Military history flourishes, and no doubt always will do, by reflecting at leisure on events imperfectly understood when they were being experienced.
But even allowing for this inherent condition of uncertainty and chaos -- what Clausewitz called the inevitable and unavoidable "friction" of war -- Western media coverage of Jenin, especially in Western European newspapers, stood out for its wild and remarkably uniform hysteria. An overwhelming number of reports were published or broadcast in outlets, more especially of the left but also of the right, appearing to document in great detail the massacre of hundreds, possibly thousands of Palestinians at the hands of the Israeli Army.
Official spokesmen of the Palestinian Authority supported and confirmed these estimates and fed these reports, yet PA spokesmen themselves later heavily revised these estimates downwards and eventually acknowledge that no massacre at all had taken place. The PA's final estimate of Palestinians killed in the Battle of Jenin was 66, while Israel said that 23 of its own troops were killed.
Given the disparity in firepower involved, the Palestinians understandably hailed this as a great morale-boosting victory for their cause, even though attacking forces normally suffer far higher casualties than defending ones in such intense street fighting.
But the small scale in casualties in Jenin, ultimately confirmed by the PA itself, underlined the remarkable loss in perspective across the European media in both reporting what was happening and then analyzing it. The initial decision of the Israelis to keep the media out of Jenin while the fighting raged does not account for this. The most hysterical and inaccurate accounts and the wildest, unsubstantiated claims came not while the international media was barred from Jenin but after it was allowed in.
Yet, compared with conflicts of the past half-century, and even of merely the past 10 years, the death toll on both sides, including Palestinians, in Jenin was tiny. Scores of thousands of people were killed largely at the hands of Bosnian Serb paramilitary groups from 1991 to 1995. The total death toll of that conflict, unquestionably Europe's bloodiest since 1945, has been estimated as at high as 250,000.
While it was ranging, 1 million people were killed in less than a month when majority Hutus slaughtered the generally more educated and more prosperous Tutsi minority in Rwanda in 1994. The killings were deliberately coordinated. The death squads usually had no heavier weapons than machetes but it ranks behind only the Cambodian Killing Fields of Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge in 1975-78 as the biggest genuine genocide of the past half-century. And it was carried out without any advanced weapons or technology -- even machineguns -- at a rate of slaughter comparable to the operations of the Auschwitz gas chambers during the Nazi annihilation of 6 million Jews during World War II.
In each of these cases, the Western media were remarkably fast to record indications of what was going on, but Western opinion lagged far behind. The Clinton administration in the United States proved exceptionally indecisive, slow and inadequate to act in any decisive diplomatic or military way to deter the slaughters in either Bosnia or Rwanda, even though it could easily have done so.
The United Nations far from preventing either of the slaughters taking place, actually magnified them by the egocentric insistence of its officials in the region on approving deterrent military or rescue operations in Bosnia, most notably at Sebrenica.
They also catastrophically underrated the imminence and scale of the danger in Rwanda. Indeed, the U.N. official most criticized for his alleged incompetence in failing to prevent the Rwanda horror was one of the most outspoken critics of Israel in the case of The Massacre That Wasn't -- current U.N. Secretary-General and Nobel Peace Prize winner Kofi Annan.
When these genuine massacres took place, there were certainly no mass rallies or protests across Western Europe and certainly no retaliatory physical attacks on Serb or Rwandan residents in Britain, France or Germany.
Yet media reports teemed in those countries with -- as it turned out -- highly exaggerated or just plain wrong descriptions of the violence allegedly inflicted by the Israelis on the Palestinians in Jenin. And as these reports ran, they were quickly followed by attacks -- largely, it appears, from young immigrant Muslim gangs -- on easily identifiable Orthodox Jews in both Britain and France.
Press reporting is far from a precise science and experienced reporters, especially war correspondents, have a universal contempt for pressure groups of both the left and the right that claim they are always inherently biased, corrupt, incompetent and just plain wrong. More often than not, the accusations of media bias made by such groups are discounted because they are either the result of unavoidable human error, insufficient data available, or the accusations themselves are just plain wrong.
Even when they are right, the multiplicity of media organizations with dozens, sometimes hundreds, of reporters competing to get the edge on each other on the same story has long been comfortably -- and usually correctly -- taken as the free media's equivalent of the free market. That competition serves as a healthy leveling mechanism in which self-interest serves as the motivation to expose incompetence or direct dishonesty on the part of others. But as this series has documented, it did not work that way in Jenin. And we have explored the reasons why this was so.
In an ideal world, the appropriate lessons would immediately be learned. But in practice, things may well go on very much as before. That is, as the legendary London Daily Telegraph columnist Michael Wharton, writing as Peter Simple, might have put it, "The Way of the World."
The already worrying gaps in politics, diplomacy and mutual perceptions between the United States and its old European allies is likely to grow in the media field as well. The common media culture and dialogue across the Atlantic may be another loser of the Jenin Massacre Myth.
<a href="http://www.upi.com/view.cfm?StoryID=20052002-032952-3644r"; target="_blank">Part One: Documenting the Myth</a>
By Martin Sieff
UPI Senior News Analyst
Published 5/20/2002 7:02 PM
WASHINGTON, May 20 (UPI) -- After the Israeli Army launched its retaliatory strike into the Palestinian Authority-ruled West Bank in early April, the international media was filled with reports that the Israelis had possibly or probably killed hundreds, even thousands, of Palestinian civilians. The reports were later disproved and even the PA itself revised its own official figure for Palestinans killed in the fierce fighting down to only 56.
Here, United Press International traces the course of this "media myth" and the reasons it became so influential and was so widely believed.
--
The U.S. and Western European media coverage of the Battle of Jenin last month raises troubling and far-reaching questions about the reliability of the modern mass media and press in conflict situations. And the answers to them are both complex and surprising.
After the Israeli Army attacked the West Bank Palestinian city of Jenin on April 2, the Western European media fell for the "Massacre Myth" in Jenin in a big way. Even though the final Palestinian Authority figure acknowledged only 56 dead in Jenin, media coverage in major Western European nations gave credence to early claims by the PA's top officials that as many as 3,000 civilians had been killed in the fighting there.
Israel's own actions led credence to the myth. The Israeli army barred the international media from Jenin as its forces drove into the city. The only sources that the media then had for what was going on there were from the Palestinians themselves. And in the inevitable confusion of battle, what the great 19th century military theoretician Carl von Clausewitz called "the fog of war" applied. At the time, both the Israeli and Palestinian authorities appeared unclear what was actually happening on the ground.
However, even allowing for these factors, the Western media coverage of Jenin, espically in the Western European press and broadcast media, largely proved to be factually wildly inaccurate in the light of what later emerged. And there was also a hysterical tone to many of them.
What made these unreliable and misleading reports all the more remarkable was that many of the worst of them emerged in the most respected and influential organizations in the British media. The British Broadcasting Corporation and three of the four so-called "quality" daily newspapers -- The Times, The Independent and The Guardian -- fell for the "Massacre Myth" hook, line and sinker. Even the more cautious and -- as it proved -- reliable "Daily Telegraph" was not entirely immune either.
On April 17, the left wing "Guardian" in an editorial drew a moral equivalence between the Israeli drive on Jenin -- which itself was in response to an unprecedented series of suicide bomb massacres of Israeli civilians -- and the mega-terrorist attacks on the United States of Sept. 11. The Israeli retaliatory operation was "every bit as repellent" as the hijacked airliner attacks that killed nearly 3,000 Americans in New York City, the Guardian proclaimed.
Janine di Giovanni, the "Times" of London's correspondent in Jenin, reported on April 16, "Rarely in more than a decade of war reporting from Bosnia, Chechnya, Sierra Leone, Kosovo have I have seen such deliberate destruction, such disrespect for human life." In terms of what was later confirmed to have actually happened, this amounted to a whopper of mis-reporting comparable to Walter Duranty's claim in The New York Times that there was no famine in the Ukraine from 1929 to 1932. In fact, 10 million Ukrainian peasants starved to death then. Duranty won a Pulitzer Prize for his (mis-)reporting.
Di Giovanni's comparison also inevitably called into question what she had actually seen in Chechnya, Bosnia and Sierra Leone if she really imagined that the death toll in Jenin was worse than any of them. At least 100,000 people are believed to have died in Russia's two wars of 1994-96 and of 1999 to the present to crush Chechen separatists. As many as 250,000 people were killed in the 1991-95 Bosnia war and many mass graves of slaughtered entire towns and villages have been discovered and excavated. Scores of thousands died in the chaotic civil wars of Sierra Leone. Yet the documented death toll in Jenin was soon established as being literally one thousand times smaller than in Bosnia and Chechnya.
Other British papers shared in the hysteria. Phil Reeves in the London Independent compared Jenin to the Killing Fields of Pol Pot's Cambodia where between 1 million to 3 million people were slaughtered from 1975 to 1978. Analysts later noted that many of these reports were openly one-sided. Reeves did not cite or quote a single Israeli source in his story. Other claims, such as the one that hundreds of Palestinian victims were buried by an Israeli bulldozer in mass grave, later proved to have no validity or verification whatsoever.
The BBC uncritically swallowed the Massacre Myth. BBC News headlined a report on April 18 as "Jenin 'Massacre' Evidence Growing," and the Guardian newspaper's headline on a May 6 analysis piece as "How Jenin Battle Became a Massacre." The BBC report said an Amnesty International investigation "has only just begun, but Palestinian claims of a massacre were gaining foundation."
The claim that Israel had committed war crimes proved to be a popular one. Reeves' story in The Independent on April 16 was headlined "Amid the Ruins, the Grisly Evidence of a War Crime," and he wrote: "A monstrous war crime that Israel has tried to cover up for a fortnight has finally been exposed." The Guardian on April 17 zeroed in on Gerald Kaufman, a Labor member of Parliament and a prominent leader in the British Jewish community, calling Ariel Sharon a "war criminal" and accusing the Israeli prime minister of "ordering his troops to use methods of barbarism against the Palestinians."
However, by the end of April, the hysteria was dying down in the British press as U.S. media reporting established that the earlier wild accusations and accounts had no validity. On April 29, the BBC interviewed military expert David Holley who concluded on the basis of the evidence by then available: "It just appears there was no wholesale killing." Holley went on to conclude, "I think massacre is a word that is too often used in these situations and it doesn't really help."
In Italy, while coverage of Jenin was still widely distorted, the hysteria and inaccuracy proved far less sweeping than in London. Instead, it broke down much more predictably along left-wing party lines, reflecting each newspaper's editorial stance and political leanings.
Il Manifesto, a left-wing newspaper and the former mouthpiece of the Italian Communist Party, said in a special Jenin-related package in its May 4 edition that the United Nations was "frightened of taking a stand in Jenin" and that Israel's actions in Jenin could be taken as war crimes.
Similarly, La Repubblica, the main center-left paper, had covered the topic with a general anti-Israel stance. That was criticized by the May 7 issue of Il Foglio, a small but powerful intellectual paper on the right that is edited by an ally of Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi.
Il Foglio ran a whole issue blasting La Repubblica's coverage, saying the paper gave a "twisted view of reality," especially taking issue with a banner headline La Repubblica ran on April 10 reading "Massacre in Jenin." In several issues, La Repubblica made the events in Jenin sound Holocaust-like, using words like "apocalyptic" and "historical." One story on April 28 that discussed the U.N. fact-finding mission, for example, was buried inside, while scathing stories blasting the Israelis were on the front.
The pro-business newspaper Il Sole/24 Ore proved much more evenhanded and reserved in its dealings with the subject than the left wing ones. For example, on April 7, the paper said in an editorial that it is impossible to get accurate news from Jenin but that "circumstantial evidence ... (seemed) to indicate a potential massacre."
Another story on April 9 quoted conflicting witnesses who said that the victims numbered in the hundreds and those who said there were around three dozen. In May, the paper ran at least two editorials complaining about "irresponsible" media coverage.
Although there was exaggerated and inaccurate reporting in the French press, serious newspapers tended to keep more of a balance than their opposite numbers in London.
The respected daily Le Monde on April 13 reported that the Israeli army had acknowledged that hundreds of people were "wounded and killed" in the Jenin refugee camp. It also reported that at least 23 Israeli soldiers had been apparently killed.
Three days later, on April 16, Le Monde again refused to be swept away by the mounting hysteria. The paper concluded, "It was still impossible Monday to confirm or deny Palestinian accusations that Tsahal (the Israeli Defense Forces) committed a 'massacre' in the camp of 15,000 refugees." On May 5, the paper stated in an editorial, "Nothing permits thinking that the Israeli army perpetuated massacres in Jenin." However it did then echo Human Rights Watch and other groups in suggesting Israel had committed war crimes there.
Even the leftist newspaper Liberation in an editorial on April 16 advised caution in dealing with the allegations.
"Up till now, nothing proves the existence of such crimes. One cannot brush (such accusations) aside - Israel is blocking all serious inquiries. [But] that is not a reason to decree them a-priori," the newspaper commented.
Liberation then recommended a lesson many other major Western European news organizations and even governments would have done well to emulate: "It is a sad diplomacy that can't distinguish facts from propaganda, even in a region where this mix is a sort of rule."
--
This report was based on the reporting of Al Webb in London, Elizabeth Bryant in Paris and Eric Lyman in Rome.
Next: Part Two: Why the Massacre Myth was Believed.
Copyright © 2002 United Press International
<a href="http://www.upi.com/view.cfm?StoryID=21052002-123835-3473r"; target="_blank">Analysis: Why Europeans bought Jenin myth</a>
By Martin Sieff
UPI Senior News Analyst
Published 5/21/2002 3:14 PM
WASHINGTON, May 21 (UPI) -- After the Israeli Army launched its retaliatory strike into the Palestinian Authority-ruled West Bank in early April, the international media was filled with reports that the Israelis had possibly or probably killed hundreds, even thousands, of Palestinian civilians. The reports were later disproved and even the Palestinian Authority itself revised its own official figure for Palestinians killed in the fierce fighting down to 56.
Here, United Press International traces the course of this "media myth" and the reasons it became so influential and was so widely believed.
-0-
Most of the major press and broadcasting outlets in Western Europe uncritically gobbled up the Jenin Massacre Myth with self-indulgent abandon. Their record contrasted particularly unfavorably -- and even, it might be argued, contemptibly -- with the remarkable balance and restraint the U.S. broadcast and print media showed after Sept. 11.
The mega-terrorist attacks that destroyed the World Trade Center towers and mauled the Pentagon killed around 3,000 Americans in New York City and Washington. Yet U.S. media coverage and reaction was remarkable for its balance and restraint. There was no effort to scapegoat the Muslim population of the United States -- estimates of its size run from 1.7 million to 7 million but it appears to be between 2 million to 3 million.
Careful distinctions were drawn repeatedly between the small number of terrorists who had actually planned and executed the attacks and the vast majority of law-abiding Muslim Americans.
By contrast, the Israeli strikes into the West Bank did not threaten French, British or other Western Europeans directly. Yet much of the coverage was exaggerated, wildly inaccurate and reflected a sweeping rush to judgment against an entire nation and the ethic group that identified with it.
Alon Ben-David, veteran military correspondent of the Israel Broadcasting Authority and currently a media fellow at the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard told United Press International: "A large part of the European media regards itself as not just reporters but as ideological crusaders. They are in the business of journalism not just for the business. They want to do good in the world. They have agendas."
And in the case of the initial massacre accusations, many of these Western European reporters "had no way of verifying the allegations they heard yet they reported them as fact, or as factually credible. That bothers me," Ben-David said.
Why were reporters and news editors of so many of the biggest and most prestigious Western European newspapers and broadcasting networks ready to believe that the Israeli Army had committed a massacre in the Palestinian West Bank city of Jenin when no massacre had in fact occurred? The reasons were many.
First, everyone was prepared to believe the worst, because the worst had already happened. It was all too credible to believe that hundreds, if not thousands, of Palestinians had been massacred in Jenin because they had been massacred before. The 20-year-old shadow of Sabra and Shatila lay across the international media's initial perceptions of Jenin.
In 1982, Lebanese Christian Falangist forces allied to the invading Israeli army massacred at least hundreds, possibly thousands, of Palestinian civilians in the refugee camps of Sabra and Shatila outside Beirut. Large numbers of women and children were among the dead. The Israeli forces did not commit the massacre or even encourage it, but a later major national inquiry in Israel issued devastating criticism of Israel's then-minister of defense, Ariel Sharon. It concluded that Sharon had not taken the precautionary action required by the warning signs and circumstances to prevent the massacre. It recommended that he never again be allowed to serve as defense minister of Israel.
The effect of Sabra and Shatila on the journalists covering it was profound. Its impact through them on the Western world, especially in Europe, was even greater. From Israel's war of independence in 1947-48 for more than 30 years through the 1967 Six Day War, the 1973 Yom Kippur War and the 1976 Entebbe rescue operation, Israel enjoyed enormous sympathy and support among the Western European media elite. Reporters, editors and their readers alike all saw it as a Jewish David struggling to survive against an Arab Goliath.
But after Sabra and Shatila, all that changed. Then, the first Palestinian uprising, or Intifada, of 1987-92 reinforced the Sabra and Shatila image that the Palestinians had replaced the Jews as an "eternally suffering" people. That image and stereotype remained, though somewhat submerged, during the hopeful years from the start of the Oslo Peace Process in 1993 to its collapse at the Camp David II summit in July 2000.
Because Sabra and Shatila had actually happened, it appeared credible that it could happen again. Because Ariel Sharon had failed to prevent Sabra and Shatila, it was easy to imagine that he had approved a second version of it on a large scale. These preconceptions proved critical in the willingness of media elites to accept the Palestinian allegations that a massacre was taking place.
Second, the Israelis haplessly and inadvertently dug a public relations trap for themselves and then promptly fell into it. They prevented the international media from covering what was certainly extremely fierce fighting in the refugee camp and streets of Jenin.
As a result, international media reporters could not see with their own eyes that a massacre in fact was not taking place. But they were receiving claims from the Palestinians that it was. And since the Israeli military were preventing the international media from going into Jenin and seeing what was happening with their own eyes, it was only too easy and obvious to conclude that they were covering up the truth of the Palestinian allegations.
Third, even when the worst fighting was over and the Israelis finally allowed reporters into Jenin, a "rat pack" psychology, even hysteria, appears to have taken hold. People saw what they wanted to see and they mutually reinforced each other in their perceptions. Thus it was that an astonishing number of reports of alleged massacres and atrocities in the different "quality" newspapers of the British press alike cited the same single Palestinian eyewitness for their allegations.
Fourth, almost none of those present had covered serious urban conflicts in Lebanon and Northern Ireland during their worst phases in the 1970s and early 1980s. Almost none of them were old enough to have experienced full-scale battle reporting first-hand in Vietnam. This led them to vastly exaggerate the scale of destruction and death they were seeing. One British reporter wrote evocatively of the stench of hundreds of dead bodies buried beneath the rubble when the Palestinian Authority, which had earlier claimed thousands had died, had revised its own official figures of those killed to less than 60.
Janine di Giovanni writing in the London Times even claimed the devastation was on a worse scale than anything she had seen in Bosnia, Chechnya or Sierra Leone, where scores, even hundreds, of thousands of people had died. The reactions of veteran reporters of real wars like Ernie Pyle or Marguerite Higgins to that kind of hyperbole would likely have been derisive laughter.
The reaction of the Western European media differed profoundly in its nature from that of U.S. newspapers and broadcasting news outlets. The allegations were equally widely reported in the United States. However, the U.S. broadcast media proved far more resistant to anti-Israeli and even anti-Semitic hysteria than that in Western European. This appears to have been the case precisely because no single state-funded or state-approved corporation dominated broadcast news in the United States, as is the case in Britain and France.
In those and other smaller countries, a well-entrenched left-wing media elite has been hostile to Israel and its policies for decades. And they have long enjoyed a cozy, unchallenged bureaucratic dominance in the state broadcasting news organizations that to a large degree set the braking news and analysis for the entire print press.
Therefore, entire echelons of editors and executives in these organizations were willing to accept uncritically the fierce unsubstantiated and hysterical reports coming out of their correspondents in Jenin. And even when individual newspapers like Le Monde in Paris or Il Foglio in Rome expressed caution or skepticism about the initial massacre claims, their warnings were drowned out in the broadcast media din. In the United States, by contrast, there is no single state-owned or subsidized national broadcasting service to set the tone.
There are four main national television networks, each one corporately or privately owned and three of them also run quasi-independent cable news networks. And there is also CNN. The cable Fox News Channel in particular seeks to position itself as relatively conservative in tone and counter-channel to the other, more liberal, "establishment" ones. With this diversity of broadcast voices, it is therefore not possible for a single network to dominate the coverage. Coverage perceived as being slavishly biased in favor of -- or against -- either Israel or the Palestinians tends to provoke strong outcries from public pressure groups and on other parts of the media.
In addition to all this, the raw material being reported from the field tended to be far more partisan and sympathetic to the Palestinian initial claims of massacre in Western Europe than in the United States. For the tradition of the practice of journalism in Europe remains far more partisan and unashamedly subjective than in the United States. The reasons for the European media's "rush to judgment" over Jenin were many, but one conclusion was inescapable: The "rush to judgment" was an "hour of shame."
--
Next: Who Won and Who Lost?
<a href="http://www.upi.com/view.cfm?StoryID=22052002-085307-9694r"; target="_blank">How Europe's media lost out</a>
By Martin Sieff
UPI Senior News Analyst
Published 5/22/2002 10:00 AM
WASHINGTON, May 22 (UPI) -- After the Israeli army launched its retaliatory strike into the Palestinian Authority-ruled West Bank in early April, the international media was filled with reports that the Israelis had possibly killed hundreds, even thousands, of Palestinian civilians. The reports were disproved and even the PA revised its official figure for Palestinians killed in the fierce fighting to 56. Here, United Press International traces the course of this "media myth" and the reasons it became so influential and was so widely believed.
Third of three parts
The U.S and Western European media covered the Jenin "Massacre That Wasn't" in radically different ways over the past month. The American media came out way on top and the European media, especially state-run broadcasting outlets, came out by far the losers.
This was not an anticipated outcome on either side of the Atlantic. It was, in fact, a further humiliation for Western European governments and left-leaning media leaders. They were already reeling from the humiliations of seeing a virtual fascist make the last two in France's presidential election and the assassination of radical political leader Pim Fortuyn in The Netherlands. That was the kind of violent political outburst that most Western Europeans have long comfortably believed could only happen in America, not to them.
Not every press or news organizations in Western Europe came out badly from the controversy over what the Israeli army did or did not do in Jenin. Media outlets like the London Sunday Times, Il Foglio in Rome and Le Monde in Paris that refused to be swept away by the hysteria gained in credibility greatly.
Even other media outlets like The Guardian of London newspaper or the Associated Press in the United States that at first reported the exaggerated claims, but then took care to present the counter evidence when it came in, showed their basic integrity. Papers like the London Times and Independent, which did not do remotely as much as The Guardian in running pieces documenting their own, and others, factual failings, fared far less well.
The affair of the Jenin "Massacre Myth" did not debunk the basic credibility of the Western media. The truth emerged at the end of the day. But the U.S. media overall were winners by far at the expense of the Western European ones.
Time magazine's in-depth reporting, for example, proved to be by the end of the day a model of how to reconstruct complex events far away under the pressure of intensely tight bylines. Its May 13 reconstruction of the battle of Jenin is likely to prove a major resource for future historians
The credibility of state-run or supported national broadcasting organizations took a huge hit. The principle of having a free market in broadcasting as well as print media outlets in order to ensure more fair and balanced overall coverage got a big boost. This was humiliating to the Europeans, who have long sneered in their dominant broadcast media culture at what they regard as the crass commercialism and vulgar pursuit of profits of competing U.S. broadcasting networks.
It was also a blow to those who would like to expand National Public Radio's small-scale radio news operation in the United States into a radio-TV news empire on the lines of the BBC or other European outlets. The reporters and editors of NPR appeared far more prone to swallow the wild allegations about Jenin than most of their U.S. media colleagues did.
The controversy also underlined the value of having widely read and circulated columnists who can act in the media like the Senate does in Congress or other "upper" houses of parliament do in Western Europe and Japan. Such columnists at their best can act like deliberative parliamentary chambers not subject to the pressures of repeated re-election campaigns. They can take a longer term view of things. They can act as cautious, more thoughtful voices expressing caution or doubt about emotional hysteria sweeping the news pages. William F. Buckley's May 4 editorial "Did the Israelis Do It?" serves as a model for this kind of writing.
Some European columnists did not do nearly so well. A.N. Wilson's willingness in the London Evening Standard to accuse the Israelis, without any credible evidence, of poisoning Palestinian water supplies showed the way columnists could break every restraint of decency and common sense. Wilson's article would have been at home in the pages of the Nazi propaganda sheet "Der Sturmer."
The U.S. and Western European media coverage of the Jenin Massacre Myth raises troubling and far-reaching questions about the reliability of mass media and press in conflict situations.
The practice of war reporting is a dirty, complicated business at the best of times. War, as wise figures from Carl Von Clausewitz to the fictional Capt. James T. Kirk of "Star Trek" have repeatedly noted, is a messy, unsure business. War is chaos incarnate both for those who wage it and for those who cover them. Military history flourishes, and no doubt always will do, by reflecting at leisure on events imperfectly understood when they were being experienced.
But even allowing for this inherent condition of uncertainty and chaos -- what Clausewitz called the inevitable and unavoidable "friction" of war -- Western media coverage of Jenin, especially in Western European newspapers, stood out for its wild and remarkably uniform hysteria. An overwhelming number of reports were published or broadcast in outlets, more especially of the left but also of the right, appearing to document in great detail the massacre of hundreds, possibly thousands of Palestinians at the hands of the Israeli Army.
Official spokesmen of the Palestinian Authority supported and confirmed these estimates and fed these reports, yet PA spokesmen themselves later heavily revised these estimates downwards and eventually acknowledge that no massacre at all had taken place. The PA's final estimate of Palestinians killed in the Battle of Jenin was 66, while Israel said that 23 of its own troops were killed.
Given the disparity in firepower involved, the Palestinians understandably hailed this as a great morale-boosting victory for their cause, even though attacking forces normally suffer far higher casualties than defending ones in such intense street fighting.
But the small scale in casualties in Jenin, ultimately confirmed by the PA itself, underlined the remarkable loss in perspective across the European media in both reporting what was happening and then analyzing it. The initial decision of the Israelis to keep the media out of Jenin while the fighting raged does not account for this. The most hysterical and inaccurate accounts and the wildest, unsubstantiated claims came not while the international media was barred from Jenin but after it was allowed in.
Yet, compared with conflicts of the past half-century, and even of merely the past 10 years, the death toll on both sides, including Palestinians, in Jenin was tiny. Scores of thousands of people were killed largely at the hands of Bosnian Serb paramilitary groups from 1991 to 1995. The total death toll of that conflict, unquestionably Europe's bloodiest since 1945, has been estimated as at high as 250,000.
While it was ranging, 1 million people were killed in less than a month when majority Hutus slaughtered the generally more educated and more prosperous Tutsi minority in Rwanda in 1994. The killings were deliberately coordinated. The death squads usually had no heavier weapons than machetes but it ranks behind only the Cambodian Killing Fields of Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge in 1975-78 as the biggest genuine genocide of the past half-century. And it was carried out without any advanced weapons or technology -- even machineguns -- at a rate of slaughter comparable to the operations of the Auschwitz gas chambers during the Nazi annihilation of 6 million Jews during World War II.
In each of these cases, the Western media were remarkably fast to record indications of what was going on, but Western opinion lagged far behind. The Clinton administration in the United States proved exceptionally indecisive, slow and inadequate to act in any decisive diplomatic or military way to deter the slaughters in either Bosnia or Rwanda, even though it could easily have done so.
The United Nations far from preventing either of the slaughters taking place, actually magnified them by the egocentric insistence of its officials in the region on approving deterrent military or rescue operations in Bosnia, most notably at Sebrenica.
They also catastrophically underrated the imminence and scale of the danger in Rwanda. Indeed, the U.N. official most criticized for his alleged incompetence in failing to prevent the Rwanda horror was one of the most outspoken critics of Israel in the case of The Massacre That Wasn't -- current U.N. Secretary-General and Nobel Peace Prize winner Kofi Annan.
When these genuine massacres took place, there were certainly no mass rallies or protests across Western Europe and certainly no retaliatory physical attacks on Serb or Rwandan residents in Britain, France or Germany.
Yet media reports teemed in those countries with -- as it turned out -- highly exaggerated or just plain wrong descriptions of the violence allegedly inflicted by the Israelis on the Palestinians in Jenin. And as these reports ran, they were quickly followed by attacks -- largely, it appears, from young immigrant Muslim gangs -- on easily identifiable Orthodox Jews in both Britain and France.
Press reporting is far from a precise science and experienced reporters, especially war correspondents, have a universal contempt for pressure groups of both the left and the right that claim they are always inherently biased, corrupt, incompetent and just plain wrong. More often than not, the accusations of media bias made by such groups are discounted because they are either the result of unavoidable human error, insufficient data available, or the accusations themselves are just plain wrong.
Even when they are right, the multiplicity of media organizations with dozens, sometimes hundreds, of reporters competing to get the edge on each other on the same story has long been comfortably -- and usually correctly -- taken as the free media's equivalent of the free market. That competition serves as a healthy leveling mechanism in which self-interest serves as the motivation to expose incompetence or direct dishonesty on the part of others. But as this series has documented, it did not work that way in Jenin. And we have explored the reasons why this was so.
In an ideal world, the appropriate lessons would immediately be learned. But in practice, things may well go on very much as before. That is, as the legendary London Daily Telegraph columnist Michael Wharton, writing as Peter Simple, might have put it, "The Way of the World."
The already worrying gaps in politics, diplomacy and mutual perceptions between the United States and its old European allies is likely to grow in the media field as well. The common media culture and dialogue across the Atlantic may be another loser of the Jenin Massacre Myth.
Comments
<strong>Great - the palestinian's tactics are to make devils out of the israelis. It's war - you have to demonize your opponent, make your soldiers hate them as well as the rest of the worl.d.</strong><hr></blockquote>
more than demonize, dehumanize
<strong>Great - the palestinian's tactics are to make devils out of the israelis. It's war - you have to demonize your opponent, make your soldiers hate them as well as the rest of the worl.d.</strong><hr></blockquote>
You 100% missed the point.
<strong>
You 100% missed the point.</strong><hr></blockquote>
Indeed .. I think the point is that the European media is completely sold out to one side ... not bothering to even check the real facts .
Once the true facts finally came out late April this stuff wasn't real headline material anymore and was barely mentioned here in the UK .. I bet most people in the street would just remember Jenin as that place where Israel massacred hundreds of Palestinians,....... but I suppose that was the whole purpose of the exercise wasn't it .........
1) News companies can only profit on new stories of death and destruction. Or victory for the side they're rooting for.
They don't make money on taking something back. If a CORRECTION is printed on the seventh page, then harrdly anyone relizes what a goof happened.
2) Propaganda is far stronger than steel. You can get other people to fight for you, if, for instance, you say that the Israelis have Anthrax bombs in their bunkers. Then the UN wil go and search the bunkers, and while the Israelis are distracted, drop a missile on them.
3) Which is better onec you've won: enslaving a people or genocide? The second is harder, as there's always interbreeding and some of your citizens will be related. but with enslaving / annexing / conquering / making a lesser province of a once-great nation, there's always a chance of uprisings.
The Romans had the right idea - all conquered people became citizens. Well, all the men anyway. They enjoyed all roman knowledge and could trade with any roman that wanted goods.
Not like the Americans conquered. We brought smallpox inadvertantly and killed every AmerIndian that survived the disease. If you're goinng to kill off a people, at least FINISH THE JOB! Dear Lord, these people had a past, a tradition, and we stomped on it and shat on the burning rubble! I am not proud of what whites did in North America.
Dehuminizing terrorists can be perceived in a war, but dehuminizing civilians should be accompanied with at least two clear photos.
I leave it to the IDF to show us those two photos, if they even care about what the rest of the world thinks they did in there.
I'm not going to bother denying that these news outlets are getting sloppier and more irresponsible all the time. I would hesitate to single out European papers for fear of ignoring similar mistakes elsewhere, including on this side of the Pond. The world of journalism is in shambles after a brief stint as being "above the fray." (That time may me more the stuff of myth than a legacy though.) Ironically, in the middle of this so-called explosion of communication, information of all kinds, be it fact, rumor, legend, or myth are creating such a huge signal-to-noise ratio that nothing really gets across. Nothing except terrorists' plans for one another. Makes you wonder if Ted Kaczynski* has a point. (Not serious.)
as for the issue of what hapenned at Jenin, I think it lies somewhere between Israeli versions and Palestinian versions, though I think it's nowhere near the death toll of 3,000 that was thrown out. Not that numbers matter when you're talking about human lives. That's not saying Israel didn't have the right and the necessity to hunt down their terrorist enemies either. Ugh, what a mess!
*side note: do a little Google search on the "unabomber" sometime. It's pretty amazing who is out there.
<strong>...
1) News companies can only profit on new stories of death and destruction. Or victory for the side they're rooting for.
They don't make money on taking something back. If a CORRECTION is printed on the seventh page, then harrdly anyone relizes what a goof happened....</strong><hr></blockquote>
Maybe you didn't read the whole thing but the author noted that in the US where you have real competition for viewers the coverage was more balanced and laced with "cannot be confirmed". Whereas in Europe where you have less competition and more state support of the press the coverage was sloppy and boarding on anti-Semitic in its lust for repeating lies about the jewish state.
The number of people who died means nothing. It doesn't matter if it's one, or ten people, or a hundred, or a thousand, or a million, or a billion. It doesn't mean anything at all. People died, that's a fact of life.
What people should be concern is... was that person killed for the right reason?
Some people who mentioned they numbers who are died (like the mass media), their primary reason is to stir up a conflict, and not really interested on reporting on what they saw.
Anyway. The same ?number game? was also played during the 11th September 2001 incident. Huge numbers were said, saying that there could be tens of thousands of people that could have killed in that day.
Thousands of body bages were ordered, the lowest number I heard were around 6.000 body bags, while some reports said that they got a round 30.000 body bags avaiable.
Now... This isn't exactly a low profile move, when a situation like this happened. You just stay silent on how many people who died, plus also expect the numbers to stay as low as possible.
But... What we see are the opposite, approximation of the death tolls are exaggerated, lots of body bags were ordered (despite not truely knowing on how many people really died).
There are really no reasons on ordering a lot of body bags just to be ?prepared?. People who are dead surely won't have any problem of waiting for their body bags. No need to supply one unless it's necessary. And in some parts of the world, people just covered the dead, no body bags.
Now... currently, the death toll number is around 2.800 people (with around 800 people said to be missing). Waaaaay lower than the so called tens of thousands, and HALF of the numbers of body bags that were ordered.
But personally, I have still have problem believing in that 2.800 number. If the situation is as worst as some people once said, the causalty should have been higher.
But... considering the reality of the situation, the numbers shouldn't have even reached over two thousands.
My god! It's 8:45 A.M. in the morning! Do you really think that there are that many people there? Yes. 50.000 people might have worked in those towers, in a busy officer hours> Yes. Many people visited those towers, but certainly not early in the morning.
Personally, I think that the people who are responsible for claiming thousands of people died both in the World Trade Center and in Jenin is the same people. This people had control of the big companies of mass media, and capable of making those big companies say anything to accomplish their agenda.
Folks... We are dealing with an international conspiracy here, that have no second thought of making a particular group of people look bad.
?They? have no problem of making the United States goverment look bad.
?They? have no problem of making the Israel goverment look bad.
?They? have no problem of making the PLO look bad.
?They? have no problem of making the Vatican look bad.
?They? have no problem of making Al-Qaeda look bad.
And so on.
Since to ?them?, those people are merely as ?tools?.
As for reports and rumours of wars.
For those who are Christians, remember what Jesus Christ said regarding this sort of stuff.
?And ye shall hear of wars and rumours of wars: see that ye be not troubled: for all these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet.? Book of Matthew, Chapter 24, line 6.
Don't worry about wars, these things are meant to happen.
Soo... IF you hear wars or rumours of wars. ?see that ye be not troubled?
<strong>Any aerial pictures before and after the incident that would prove UPI's claims? Pictures in which demolishing of few house, and not the neighborhoods that biased media have shown.
Dehuminizing terrorists can be perceived in a war, but dehuminizing civilians should be accompanied with at least two clear photos.
I leave it to the IDF to show us those two photos, if they even care about what the rest of the world thinks they did in there.
Sure .. these are the photos you asked for ( can be found <a href="http://www.mfa.gov.il/mfa/go.asp?MFAH0ll60"; target="_blank">here</a>
Bear in mind another fact - many of the buildings destroyed in Jenin were destroyed by the hundreds of booby traps placed by palestinian militants all over the place. many Palestinian civilians kept getting hurt by these unexploded bombs when they were trying to clear the rubble after the fighting ended. the Area is still considered unsafe due the the extent of the bobytraping.
Aerial Photographs of Jenin
April 2002
The City of Jenin including the Jenin refugee camp
prior to Operation Defensive Shield
(area of refugee camp marked off)
Enlargement of Jenin refugee camp and combat zone
on April 13, 2002, after the battle.
Combat zone
(approx. 100m X 100m)
< --\t1000 meters (2/3 mile)\t-- >
Additional aerial views of combat zone in Jenin refugee camp:
Do you see now ?
[quote]Originally posted by BuonRotto:
<strong>
as for the issue of what happened at Jenin, I think it lies somewhere between Israeli versions and Palestinian versions, though I think it's nowhere near the death toll of 3,000 that was thrown out. Not that numbers matter when you're talking about human lives. That's not saying Israel didn't have the right and the necessity to hunt down their terrorist enemies either. Ugh, what a mess!
</strong><hr></blockquote>
[quote]Originally posted by digix:
<strong>
What people should be concern is... was that person killed for the right reason?
</strong><hr></blockquote>
Well, even the PA now claims only around 60 people have died there , once the Red cross and human rights watch updated their numbers and the International interest died out they figured they'll gain more by telling the truth...
But the main point as you say ( and I agree with you) is not the number of dead but who they were and weather they were massacred in cold blood or killed in battle ... on this point there is still fierce contentions between the sides but all experts and serious observes ( even those who are usually critical of Israel such and Human rights watch and the Palestinian Red Crescent etc...) agree that there was no massacre in Jenin there were no summery executions of militants or civilians and there were no IDF attempts of hiding bodies and crimes as the palestinians try and paint the story ... all sources ( apart from Arab ones) agree that the massive majority of dead were militants killed in the fighting.
But the whole point is that its too late now anyway , its yesterday's story ... the damage has been done to Israel's image and that was the whole point of what these so called journalists were out to achieve, all we can do now is expose it .
Edit : add captions to photos
[ 05-26-2002: Message edited by: rashumon ]</p>
It is clear that only about 50 buildings were knocked down. Considering the other area of demolition, I would say maximum 60 buildings.
That definitely would not add up to the total death toll counted by the Palestinians, definitely they exaggerated in that count.
<strong>Thanks for the photos rushmon.
It is clear that only about 50 buildings were knocked down. Considering the other area of demolition, I would say maximum 60 buildings.
That definitely would not add up to the total death toll counted by the Palestinians, definitely they exaggerated in that count.</strong><hr></blockquote>
Even the Palestinias have stopped talking about thousands of casualties... The Palestinian Red Crescent puts the number at under 60.
<strong>I don't like this kind of ?number game?.
The number of people who died means nothing. It doesn't matter if it's one, or ten people, or a hundred, or a thousand, or a million, or a billion. It doesn't mean anything at all. People died, that's a fact of life. </strong><hr></blockquote>
I'm sure you were crying "massacre" some weeks ago. Now when confronted with the truth and how the European press lied you turn around and now claim that the numbers are not important.
As for the death toll on 9-11 I'll explain it to you again. The number started by counting the number of people in there on a typical day. Reports were "50,000 people work there in a day". As time went on and information got better the number went down and down. After a while they went from top down to a bottom up count. Assume everyone got out and count the number of missing. That got us to about 5000. That was refined more and more until we got the the 3000 were at now. It's part of the "fog of war" mentioned in the article that I suspect you didn't read.
It's amazing to me when you are confronted with the real number of Jenin you say it doesn't matter. It was bad either way. Then when it comes to 9-11 you say it wasn't bad as people said and you think the true numbers are even lower. Seems to me that you are trying to marginalize the terrorist attacks on the US using the numbers game went when it doesn't server your purpose, Jenin, you claim the numbers aren't important and the jewish state is wrong no matter what happened.
It smacks of anti-American hatred and at the very least anti-Semitic bias on your part. You need a dose of honesty.
[ 05-26-2002: Message edited by: scott_h_phd ]</p>
<strong>
the European press lied
[ 05-26-2002: Message edited by: scott_h_phd ]</strong><hr></blockquote>
It's not written in the article. They misunformed the people by a lack of serious professionnal journalism. It's very different from a lie which is due on purpose. the misinformation was due to incompetence (prefer the palestinian version rather than the Israeli one : very bad indeed, but different than to be a direct witness and said the contrary that you see).
For the british media i have no opinion because i do not follow it. For the french one, according to the report i see nothing bad except the prematurate declaration of the april 13.
Your article said : Three days later, on April 16, Le Monde again refused to be swept away by the mounting hysteria. The paper concluded, "It was still impossible Monday to confirm or deny Palestinian accusations that Tsahal (the Israeli Defense Forces) committed a 'massacre' in the camp of 15,000 refugees." On May 5, the paper stated in an editorial, "Nothing permits thinking that the Israeli army perpetuated massacres in Jenin." However it did then echo Human Rights Watch and other groups in suggesting Israel had committed war crimes there.
Excuse me, but i do not see any huge faults here, the journalist have the rigt to echo Human Rights Watch, even if they are not always reliable, the lector is able to make his own opinion. During the Jenin event , no media was there it is the main reason for the hysteria crisis of the media. I quite understand it's difficult in this event to permit a media coverage for obvious security and milatary secret reasons: but secrets leads to the foolish rumors : here on AI we are specialist ...
I will add, that i am happy there was not massacre in Jenin, personnaly i have always think that the Israeli where not fool enough to commit monstruosities.
If the US government had done the same thing you would have been all over it. But because it's your beloved agenda driven media you give them a pass.
<strong>When you say something that's not true it's a lie. When the European press repeated information that they could not possibly back up that's a lie. They lied in their characterization of the actions of the Jewish state.
If the US government had done the same thing you would have been all over it. But because it's your beloved agenda driven media you give them a pass.</strong><hr></blockquote>
i dont share your conception of a lie : if in a exam you write false things or invent them : it's a fault, if you write false things on purpose it's a lie. Anyway i won't give a medal and a good appreciation for a work full of error.
Concerning the media, i do not appreciate especially my media, personnaly concerning my job except the specialised press, i do not appreciate the way media report things. But we need media however, so we have to support it, free media are an element of democratia even if many times they are far from beeing perfect. I do not make any comment about US media, because i do not read them. The only US thing that i used to read was the Time, but i stop the subsription, because their customers service where so stupid.
<strong>
i dont share your conception of a lie : if in a exam you write false things or invent them : it's a fault, if you write false things on purpose it's a lie. Anyway i won't give a medal and a good appreciation for a work full of error.
Concerning the media, i do not appreciate especially my media, personnaly concerning my job except the specialised press, i do not appreciate the way media report things. But we need media however, so we have to support it, free media are an element of democratia even if many times they are far from beeing perfect. I do not make any comment about US media, because i do not read them. The only US thing that i used to read was the Time, but i stop the subsription, because their customers service where so stupid.</strong><hr></blockquote>
Nice try to redefine the meaning of the word "lie". Fact is the European media lied about the Jewish state. Much like the Nazis did before WW2 and the Arab press does now. Not good company to keep.
I don't agree with you on the second part either. An independent media is central to democracy. If the media sucks from the teat of the government how can it be considered to be free of bias?
I think you?re a little to engrossed in the "superiority" of your system to see it?s faults. Your loath to criticize yourself and would rather explain it away. Time to look in the mirror and demand better from your press in the future.
<strong>
I don't agree with you on the second part either. An independent media is central to democracy. If the media sucks from the teat of the government how can it be considered to be free of bias?
</strong><hr></blockquote>
White state-owned media can be biased don't forgot the huge mega-conglomerate corporations that own the media in North America (except we do have one state subsidized network in Canada - the CBC) is also biased and serve their own corporate agenda.
It might seem that this would be alright because you have several different networks but they will all still be biased.
But still, having more private ones is better. Here in Canada we have 1 state-owned and 2 major private networks here.
Is it just me or are we possible (and i hope not) direction of another holocaust. Anti-semitic propganda was common in Nazi Germany, and we are seeing anti-Israeli and even anti-semitic behavior (cleverly concealed as just being against Israel, not the Jewish people, cough cough bullsh!t cough cough.)
But at least this time if there is another holocaust we luckily have our own state this time to help.
Let's hope that never happens and the media stops rycling lies about the Jewish people and their state.
Possibly the pro-Palestinian reporting (allegations of hundreds killed) by some of the British press, for example, is because the Brits traditionally lend support to the underdog, by default. Perhaps it's something to do with the fact that (the Brits) are an island nation which has been "up against the wall" and threatened by numerous enemies, on numerous occasions in the last 2000 years? The Palestinian people are very definitely the "underdogs" in the region, shunned as much by other Arab nations as the Israelis.
Although tiny in square miles, Israel is the most powerful nation of the middle east by far; all that talk of the Israelis being "pushed into the sea" by the arabs is holds no water. Israel, if backed completely into a corner could wipe out any Arab enemy in very short order. Perhaps this resolve has something to do with the fact that the Jewish people have (arguably) been the most brutalized, discriminated against, and those most subjected to baseless and arbitrary hatred in recorded history. And still, they are surrounded by hostile nations.
Israel's nuclear arsenal of some 300+ warheads, their extremely well-trained military, the world's most efficient and ruthless intelligence service (Mossad), and also the fact that they can rely 100% on the support of the US (if anything really untoward threatens) will ensure that the state of Israel will continue to exist. If only their Arab neighbors would a leaf out of Israel's book, and dispense with those outmoded monarchies, autocracies and vicious regimes, and give their own people a bit of a chance, for once, to live and be fairly represented. Only then may peace come to the region. Perhaps Palestine should also follow that example and have a shy at democracy too. It seems to work elsewhere...if you can't beat them, join them. Or are they all suffering from that old, sad condistion known as "Testosterone OD" and the morbid fear of "losing face"? Is Arafat up for it? My guess is Not.