A TIME TO SPEAK
Vol. VI:4 (No. 64)
September 2006 - Ellul 5766/Tishri 5757
THE NEWS-FAKERS
You shall not bear a false report. Do not join . . .
with a wicked man to be a malicious witness.
-- Exodus 23:1
The job of announcing news and events has passed from
town criers to newspapers to radio broadcasts to television broadcasts,
becoming ever more far-reaching in scope and heavier in weight.
The job has been performed with various degrees of
competence and honesty, with a present trend to incompetence and dishonesty. In
the international MSM [Main Stream Media] coverage of
Bad reporting comes in part from: (1) journalists'
ignorance and lack of experience; (2) dependence on local
"stringers", who are often Arabs feeding reporters what they want
them to report; (3) careless propagation of unchecked reports from dubious
sources. To quote an excuse recently offered by the AP [Associated Press] Chief
Jerusalem Correspondent: "All we can do is
report what everyone's telling us."
On an even more degraded level, reporting and
misreporting are twisted to advance a reporter's personal anti-Israel agenda --
something the BBC and its MSM ilk seem to make a requirement for the job.
Reporters and editors can slant the news to suit
themselves, choose what events to cover and what to cover-up. They can also
twist stories by the words they choose:
For example:
[1] "
[2]
"Occupation" of the
[3]
"Illegal" for Israeli communities that are by no definition
illegal
[4]
"Militants" for terrorist murderers
[5]
"Peace Activists" for Western abettors of said
"militants"
The pattern of reporting, misreporting, and non-reporting
is revealing: By no coincidence at all, if a story can be used to make
* * * * * * * * * * * *
False witnesses have risen against me, and such as breathe
out violence.
-- Psalm 27:12
"A truth is not hard to kill . . . a lie told well is
immortal."
-- Mark Twain
Even when false reporting is exposed, often by sources
outside the MSM, the truth does not catch up with the lie. Thus the news-fakers
do incalculable harm to
[1]
The Fake: an AP photographer snapped a picture of a young man
on the ground, injured and bleeding, with an Israeli in uniform standing over
him wielding a club. The AP distributed it with the caption: "An Israeli
Policeman and a Palestinian on the
The Reality: The injured youth was an
American Jewish student. A gang of Arabs pulled him out of his taxi and beat
and stabbed him. The Israeli in uniform rescued him, and was standing over him
to protect him. The site was
[2]
The Fake:
Arab gunmen opened fire on an IDF post, and the Israeli soldiers fired
back.
A reporter for France-2 Television and his Arab
photographer were engaged in staging and filming activities at the Arab
position when the photographer snapped two pictures of a man and his young son,
crouching behind a cement block. In the first picture, the boy was huddled
behind his father. In the second picture, he was slumped over on his father.
The French reporter on the instant announced to the
world that the boy, named as Muhammad
al-Dura, had just been killed by Israeli soldiers. He assiduously sent out free
copies of the exclusive photographs to newspapers, news agencies, and
broadcasters, that in turn gave them obsessive coverage. The story and the
pictures everywhere stirred fury at Israeli brutality in murdering Arab
children.
French television showed a special feature on
"The Death of Little Muhammad". The PA [Palestinian Authority] made
him the star character in training films for child suicide-terror martyrs.
One European spokesman came to this satisfying
conclusion: "At last, we can forget that picture of the Jewish boy"
-- meaning the much-reproduced photograph of a small Jewish boy surrendering to
Nazi Storm Troopers.
The Reality: Israeli officials hastily and incorrectly said it was possible that in
the crossfire the boy might have been accidentally hit from the IDF post, a
position where the soldiers could not have seen him. If so, it was deeply
regretted. This statement gave damaging credence to an accusation that turned
out to be altogether false.
Assiduous technical studies of relative positions,
lines of fire, and angles of trajectory showed that it was simply not possible
that a bullet fired from the IDF position could have hit Muhammad al-Dura. The
bullet could only have come from one of the Arab gunmen near to him. This study
was all but ignored by the MSM that had been so avidly spread the early version
damaging to
Later and even more detailed studies uncovered good
grounds to suppose that the incident had actually been staged by the French
reporter, and the photographs had been posed.
Muhammad al-Dura was definitely not killed by an
Israeli soldier, not even unknowingly or accidentally. There is no proof that
he was killed at all. [See further Issues No. 21, 47]
[3] Jenin, April 2002
After the city of
The Fake: The MSM reported a Jenin Massacre, in which
The pervasive hysteria infected such easily duped officeholders as British Foreign Secretary Jack Straw and European Union Foreign Affairs honcho Sir Christopher Patten, and Swedish Foreign Minister Anna Lindt.
Reuters
illustrated a report on Jenin with a photograph of a body being dragged through
the street. The picture was in fact taken in
United Nations' Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process Terje Roed-Larsen averred to the press that the "devastation" was "horrific beyond belief" -- that he had witnessed families pulling kin from the rubble of destroyed houses -- that "There's a stench of decaying corpses all over the place here, the scene is absolutely unbelieveable". His one true word here is "unbelievable".
The Reality: The anti-terrorist action in Jenin was confined to a small area that housed the bulk of the terrorists. There was no attack on Jenin as a whole.
The total number of Arab casualties in the Jenin Massacre was finally tallied at 56, a large majority of them active weapons-bearing terrorists. Even the PLO did not dispute this.
United
Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan cancelled an official inquiry when it
became likely that it would not be able to produce the desired proof of
[4] Gush Katif (
The Fake:
On this occasion, the fake was the work not of
foreign media but of
The foreign MSN joined with the local branch to stir
up outrage at what was termed a "lynching".
The Reality: Onlookers at the scene
provided both witnesses and photographs of a news cameraman inventing,
staging and filming the alleged lynching
The victim of the lynching himself denied that he was killed
or injured.
[5]
The Fake:
A family of eight Gaza Arabs were having an outing on the beach. A shell or
missile exploded at the spot, and seven of them were killed. One, a teen-aged
girl, was not injured. An Arab cameraman, who hastened to the spot to take
pictures explained that she survived because at the moment of the attack she
had been swimming in the sea.
The story flashed around the world was that
Once again,
The Reality: The German newspaper Sued
Deutschedaily pointed out that the girl just emerged from the sea was fully
clad in dry clothing, while she directed the photographer on how to snap the
scene. Furthermore, a number of people had remained on the beach, and had not
left an area supposedly under Israeli
bombardment.
The actual cause of the explosion is not certain, but
it most likely came from one of the PLO/Hamas stockpiles buried in the sand.
[6]
The Fake:
An AP cameraman took a picture of a man carrying the body of his five-year-old
daughter to a
The Reality: Some days later came an admission that the little girl had suffered a
fatal head injury when she fell off a swing.
* * * * * * * * * * * *
"In a time of universal deceit, telling
the truth becomes a revolutionary act."
-- George Orwell
"They must have worked long and hard to make
themselves what they are,
for such stupidity does not come naturally." -- Samuel Johnson
In the summer of 2006, when Hizbullah aggression and
-- They presented their news as though it was factual
and objective, yet some later admitted that they were fed the words and the
views by Hizbullah, and obeyed its orders.
-- They ground out non-stop descriptions and
depictions of any kind of casualty, damage, or distress in
-- They counted terrorists as "civilians"
when giving tallies of Lebanese casualties. (They apparently assumed that man
who stored his missiles in a civilian apartment house full of women and children
and fired them from the roof or through a window must himself be a
"civilian".)
-- They grossly exaggerated damage to
At the same time, the MSM gave little note to
Hizbullah's indiscriminate firing of some 4,000 long-range Katushya rockets
into
* * * * * * * * * * * *
Media distortion, misrepresentation, and ignorance are
not new. What is new is how quickly and competently the collective malfeasance
can be exposed. The MSN has lost its monopoly on deciding what the world should
or should not know. And the monopoly was lost not to a business competitor but
to private
Stories and accompanying
photographs printed and broadcast by the MSM were subjected to care and
knowledgable analysis, that revealed fakes, frauds, and hoaxes,. Disseminated
by professional journalists who were either hoodwinked or complicit.
The gullibility
of the professionals and the contrasting astuteness of the amateurs feature in
excerpts from "Terrorist Theater Tricks", by Caroline B. Glick, The
Jerusalem Post, August 2006:
"[. . . . ] As is the case with the Palestinian
war against
"[. . . . ] Both the global media and the
international NGO [Non-Governmental Organization] community abjectly refuse to
investigate themselves. As democratic governments and their militaries have
proven incapable of dealing with the phenomenon (in part because they seek to
curry favor with the media and the international NGO community), the
blogosphere has taken upon itself the role of media watchdog.
"Bloggers have become a critical component of the
free world's defense in the current war. During the Hizbullah campaign in
"The blogosphere, and particularly Little
Green Footballs, Powerline, Zombietime, Michelle
Malkin, and EU Referendum, have relentlessly exposed the
systematic staging of news events, fabrication of attacks against relief
workers, and doctoring of photographic images by Hizbullah with the active
assistance of international organizations and the global media."
The international news agencies and other MSM
distributed many photographs to illustrate their coverage of
[1] The
Fake: A Hizbullah missile struck an Israeli warship and did some damage
to it. Hizbullah claimed the ship had been sunk, and produced a photograph of
a warship being blown in half, that was
duly published by the MSM.
The Reality: The photograph actually
showed an obsolete and decommissioned Australian warship deliberately destroyed
by the Australian Navy.
[2] The
Fake: Reuters bought and distributed hundreds of pictures taken by a
Lebanese photographer. Among the most widely used were: (A) a shot of two
massive billows of smoke filling the sky over a
The Reality: (A) An alert newspaper reader noticed that that the billows of smoke
were exactly identical in size and shape, and brought this to the attention of
Charles Johnson, proprietor of Little Green Footballs. Johnson, himself a
photographer as well as a musician, proved that a single billow had been
duplicated to give the impression of a broader attack and greater damage. (B)
The Israeli plane had released a single signal flare. The missiles had been inserted by the
photographer.
[3] The Fake: A series of news pictures were circulated showing distraught Lebanese women outside the ruins
of bombed houses, bewailing the destruction of their homes.
The Reality: The model in each case was
one and the same woman, posing outside a variety of buildings.
[4] The Fake:
Members of the Social Services
Department of Hizbullah were filmed distributing cash compensation to civilians
who had suffered property damage or loss.
The cash was in
The Reality: Bloggers who enlarged and
analyzed the pictures revealed what none of the journalist/photographers on the
scene noticed. The cash was counterfeit -- perhaps drawn from Hizbullah's large
reserves of counterfeit
[5] The Fake: Hizbullah set up a missile-launching site near the
town of
Hours after this attack, the MSM were summoned to see
a three-story apartment house that had collapsed. The toll of civilian
casualties was first given as 60 and soon reduced to 28. The victims were women
and children, and toys were pathetically scattered on the ruins.
Lebanese "rescue workers", supervised by a
man who came to be known as Green Helmet Guy, paraded around displaying the
corpses of children.
The MSM dutifully and dolefully poured out a deluge of
words and pictures of the Qana Massacre just perpetrated by
The Reality: The last Israeli airstrike near
the site was made about
Photographs and video films taken at the site reveals
that "rescue" activity was staged and restaged in front of the
cameras, bodies carried back and forth, even taken in and out of ambulances to
be posed for more pictures -- the entire performance produced and directed by
Green Helmet Guy.
The MSM witnesses of his production neglected to
report any of these details of the Qana Massacre. Websites -- especially
EUReferendum -- were more alert. They noted that some of the children
reportedly killed in the recent collapse showed signs of rigor mortis that
could not have set in so quickly.
The pathetic toys looked new and clean, not damaged or
dirty from the blast and collapse of the structure.
The time stamps on media photographs show that the
same bodies were shown at different times, repeatedly pulled out of the ruins,
carried by the same rescue workers who had changed their garments and gears
between appearances.
A scantily clad man photographed gracefully supine
among the ruins was later photographed walking around unhurt.
Hizbullah personnel chatted on cell-phones, but when
aware of lens focused on them burst into weeping.
The media failed to question whether that building had
in fact been brought down by an Israeli bombardment or by Hizbullah explosives.
[6] The Fake:
The Lebanese branch of the Red
Cross reported that two of its ambulances had been bombed by
[Comment: It is to be expected that the Israeli
military would be familiar with Red Cross Ambulances since it has found so many
of them in
Hizbullah showed the MSM photographs of an ambulance
with a hole in the roof at exactly the spot where the Red Cross emblem would
have appeared -- with the implication that the sacrosanct emblem had been used
as a target. The driver gave a series of
interviews, in each one adding new grisly details of how a missile came through
the roof, wrecked the interior of the vehicle, ignited a fire, caused wounds to
him and grievous injuries to his passengers.
The MSM had a field day with this atrocity, screaming
"war crime" in a variety of languages. Reporters poured out purple
prose to describe a scene they had not seen. Their sources were Hizbullah
statements, the histrionics of the ambulance-driver, and a couple of
photographs by local Lebanese photographers. They were not shown an actual
ambulance, a curious omission that did not provoke curiosity.
The story spun from these wisps was passed on to the
outside world without query or scrutiny.
It was given apoplectic prominence by
the AP, the BBC, MSNBC, The New York Times, The
Julian
Manyon, an award-winning
The ICRC [International Committee of the Red Cross]
supported its protege Lebanese Red Cross, and posted the photograph of the
victim ambulance on its website.
The Reality: The queries and scrutiny neglected by the MSM were provided by proprietors of websites and blogs who from a far distance could discern what the MSM veterans on the spot never noticed -- or never mentioned. [An exhaustive scrutiny was made by a website proprietor and photographer known as Zombie, whose conclusions appear at length on www.zombietime.com
.]