Tuesday, May 18, 2021

Ran across this piece on the media in the mideast, and it covers a lot

of why they're not trusted, and APs "We never saw any evidence of Hamas in the building!" isn't believed.  One bit:
When Hamas’s leaders surveyed their assets before this summer’s round of fighting, they knew that among those assets was the international press. The AP staff in Gaza City would witness a rocket launch right beside their office, endangering reporters and other civilians nearby—and the AP wouldn’t report it, not even in AP articles about Israeli claims that Hamas was launching rockets from residential areas. (This happened.) Hamas fighters would burst into the AP’s Gaza bureau and threaten the staff—and the AP wouldn’t report it. (This also happened.) Cameramen waiting outside Shifa Hospital in Gaza City would film the arrival of civilian casualties and then, at a signal from an official, turn off their cameras when wounded and dead fighters came in, helping Hamas maintain the illusion that only civilians were dying. (This too happened; the information comes from multiple sources with firsthand knowledge of these incidents.)

 Colford, the AP spokesman, confirmed that armed militants entered the AP’s Gaza office in the early days of the war to complain about a photo showing the location of a rocket launch, though he said that Hamas claimed that the men “did not represent the group.” The AP “does not report many interactions with militias, armies, thugs or governments,” he wrote. “These incidents are part of the challenge of getting out the news—and not themselves news.”

This is stuff they've been caught at.  Repeatedly.  But they still claim either it didn't happen, or it's not what it looks like.

Have a friend who once, during the Democrat primaries, as part of her proof that most media is balanced and fair, posted a chart from 'official sources' showing just how much they were.  Which included showing Bloomberg as just about in the middle of left/right leaning.  I asked if that was the same Bloomberg that had just announced that it wouldn't investigate/report on Bloomberg or the other Democrats, but would the Republicans?  Didn't get an answer.

There've always been problems with some media being biased one way or the other, I think the big difference in the past was it was more open.  Now we've got most major media biased drastically to the left and denying to the death that it's true.  Hell, we've got a bunch of these idiots wanting restrictions on the 1st Amendment to prevent people saying/reporting things they don't approve of.  Either not believing or not caring that such restrictions WILL be used to rip their own ass off down the road.

Throw in people like Al Sharpton getting a place on PMSNBC.  Add Calypso Louie broadcasting a sermon wherein he mused about the wonderful effect if a 'thousand righteous men' started going around killing white people, and far as I know nobody in the MM said one damned word about it.

Lord, what a mess.  And I don't see it improving anytime soon.  If at all.

1 comment:

Phelps said...

Why I don't care about any of the "concerns" raised in this article:

Matti Friedman is an Israeli-Canadian reporter based in Jerusalem and the author of Pumpkinflowers: A Soldier’s Story and The Aleppo Codex.

But, you know, they didn't tell you that this secular "American" reporting comes from a religious and political partisan in the fight.