By Barry Rubin
Saying that the New York Times misreported on the Middle East in a way deliberately intended to be biased against Israel is like writing an article with the headline, “Dog Bites Man!” Still, since this behavior is so often unintentionally humorous, I can’t resist quoting the lead of the newspaper’s main story on the “flytilla” attempt to disrupt Israel’s airport and air travel:
“Israel prevented a gathering of foreigners here on Friday by blocking, deterring or deporting hundreds of air travelers who had been invited by Palestinian activists to fly into Israel’s Ben-Gurion International Airport and then travel to the West Bank for a week of “fellowship and actions.”
Now if this was true, those foreigners–unless they had engaged in some violent or directly subversive action (abetting terrorists, smuggling in money)–would have arrived in the airport, walked thorugh the terminal, and boarded buses to go to the West Bank without difficulty. Hundreds of anti-Israel activists have done so in the past.
Remember, too, that this action arose directly out of the failed flotilla a few days previously, an operation backed by Hamas and the Muslim Brotherhood.
In fact, as was repeatedly stated by the organizers and participants both publicly and on every sort of social media, they planned to hold a demonstration at the airport that would in effect close it down. The author of the article must know this as should any editor at the newspaper who has been following the story.
While a lot of the mass media has been transformed over the last 10 or 20 years from reasonably objective (albeit far from perfect) to slanted, in the last five years it has been further fundamentally transformed to outright conscious lies and shameless propaganda.
Where are the journalism professors, journalism reviews, and editors who will condemn this kind of behavior rather than condone and even advocate it? Does anyone ever get fired for systematically producing propaganda rather than proper journlaism? I haven’t heard of a single case in either category.
An honest lead would have read:
Israel blocked, deterred or deported hundreds of anti-Israel activists who planned a demonstration at Ben-Gurion International airport and then to travel to the West Bank for a week of demonstrations and support activities for the Palestinians there.
That’s a perfectly reasonable, balanced, and fair lead. Instead, the paragraph was intended to make Israel seem like a police state persecuting nice people who just wanted to go make friends with Palestinians.
Perhaps 30-40 percent of the American people think that nothing has changed in the American mass media and that it presents the news in a reasonable way. (For example, conservatives really are really bloodthirsty, racist, monsters while anyone who criticizes the Obama Administration is right-wing and should be ignored–only kidding.) Another 30-40 percent perhaps think things have always been like this.
If you don’t understand how an organ like the New York Times has gone from being a liberal-oriented but professional and responsible newspaper into a disgraceful propaganda sheet, it is impossible to comprehend what has gone wrong in America.
Note: My usual disclaimer applies.There are many good journalists who work in the mainstream media and do their job properly and many good reporters even on the New York Times.
I have seen the story that the group were “merely” en route to the West Bank in the Dutch (language) media. Sad all round, and apparently par for the course these days.
Too bad about The New York Times. They have lost their dignity.
I love this sentence from that NYT article : “The Israeli news media added to the hype by calling it a “flightilla” — a reference to the flotilla of boats that was supposed to challenge Israel’s naval blockade of Gaza last month but has been stymied by Israeli pressure and by the cooperation of the Greek port authorities.” You stay unbiased, NYT.
I think maybe we should start doing what the papers say we’re doing. Surely we could make our lives easier by sending all the stupid demonstrators that are here permanently (I wonder who’s paying the bills for those permanently “concerned citizens”) back home and make sure they never land here again. We’ll be accused of it anyway, so why not behave like Egypt who told George Galloway and his companions that if they’ll show up again they’ll use live fire on them? You don’t hear the NY Times babbling about that all the time, do you? Because they never came back to demonstrate or riot in Egypt again.
You once talked about those people, legions in fact, who “lie for peace”. But the NY Times isn’t lying for peace. They lie to destroy Israel. Why else would they run in their paper a debate about whether Israel has a right to exist? There’s no other country in the entire world whose basic right to exist has been challenged in a large mainstream paper, no other country whose destruction has been mainstreamed like that. I suppose at this time still a majority of Americans (but a minority of Europeans) will answer “Yes” to this question – yes, Israel has a right to exist. Which is why the likes of the NY Times will just have to double their efforts to smear and vilify us until a majority will rule that Israel must die. What will the US do then? Gather its own SS divisions to come here and incinerate us?
Will these dark times ever pass?
If our enemies annihilate us with the help of the West, the West will come to regret it. It’ll be the beginning of the end for Western civilization at the hands of the same enemies.
The last bastion of the Left will always be their mythmakers and propagandists in education and the media. Big Labor has always provided the funding and the foot soldiers but basic reality is slowing eroding Big Labor’s power. But even as their real power slowly dissolves and the failures of their ideology are repeatedly exposed, the cancer of their lies is still metastasizing. But thanks to the new media, like PJM, we are better equipped than ever before to identify, expose and resist the Big Lie.
an organ like the New York Times has gone from being a liberal-oriented but professional and responsible newspaper
Since when a responsible newspaper? Since it covered up reporting on the gassing of Jews during the Second World War? Like the BBC for that matter.
There may be good journalists at work but not those with the NYT and prepared to have their names sullied with the association.
Funny thing is that today Roger Kimball is also exposing the professionalism of NYT journalists
Pot Meet Kettle (New York Times Edition)