Israel Hayom..
07 July '13..
Sometimes, fortuitous coincidences occur. Last Friday, we ran an article in Israel Hayom about the Israeli daily Yedioth Ahronoth's tendency to publish unfounded stories that have no relation to the facts. And, as if by magic, just to prove our point, that very same day Yedioth Ahronoth published, prominently, a story about a person who doesn't exist.
The subject of the feature was a woman named Fatma Vardi, who was purportedly the first female Bedouin stand-up comic in Israel. According to the article, Fatma is not just any Bedouin comic, she is also one of her husband's four wives, a mother of 17 children and all kinds of other tall tales (including residence in a village that, as a superficial investigation reveals, does not exist in Israel).
As usual, Yedioth Ahronoth bought the whole story, hook, line and sinker. With a simple Google search they could have easily found out that the woman in question was actually a Ramat Gan resident named Gila Zimmerman. She has been performing for years as various characters, one of which is Fatma the Bedouin.
The journalistic work on that article was so shoddy that whoever wrote it didn't think to visit her home, meet her Bedouin husband, another wife, or any of her children. Nothing. She said whatever she said, and they printed it.
I am willing to bet that until last weekend, Haim Zinovich didn't believe that he could describe himself as the creator of a cultural phenomenon. Zinovich, an Israeli musician, is remembered less for his music and more for those few weeks in 2000 when he dealt a stinging slap to Yedioth Ahronot when he posed as a Mizrahi singer who performs in a wheelchair with bandages all over his face (he convinced the paper that he had been burned all over in house fire from which he could not escape because he had been paralyzed by a fall). He did all this to promote an album recorded by this fictional character, which everyone had come to know as "The Burnt Man."
Not too long after the feature about "Mr. Burnt" was published, Zinovich appeared on a television show hosted by none other than current Finance Minister Yair Lapid and revealed his true identity, and that the entire "burnt" story was just a gimmick meant to expose the truth about the Israeli media.
Last weekend, Zinovich's successor picked up where he left off. There is a television show in the U.S. called "America's Dumbest Criminals" where bank robbers show the bank teller their IDs, home invaders fall asleep in the homes they break into and carjackers buy gas for stolen cars with their real credit cards. It seems that Yedioth Ahronoth -- with their well-known sympathy for convicted criminals like Aryeh Deri and Haim Ramon -- wrote a hit episode of that show over the weekend.
The problem is that beyond the humor in it, this incident also raises questions about the credibility of the information Yedioth Ahronoth provides its readers. For example, for a long time Yedioth Ahronoth cultivated the thesis that we were about to experience a "diplomatic tsunami" as a result of the Palestinian Authority's unilateral measures for statehood at the United Nations. They even had a date set for this tsunami, but this date has long expired.
Here is another example: In the weeks prior to U.S. President Barack Obama's visit to Israel, Yedioth Ahronoth explained over and over to its readers that Obama was coming to Israel during his second term, once he no longer needs the Jewish vote for re-election and furious at Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, to put the Israeli government in its place. They prepared us for an international disaster, and in the end the state of Israel got a warm, even loving, embrace.
Or, for example, when the Prime Minister's Office Chief of Staff Gil Shefer announced that he would resign from his post, Yedioth Ahronoth insisted that the resignation was due to a dispute between Shefer and Netanyahu's wife, Sara. Yedioth continued peddling that story last Friday, while Shefer was enjoying a rafting trip on the Jordan River with Benjamin and Sara Netanyahu.
The Fatma affair once again highlighted how these things happen: negligence, laziness and the total absence of basic journalistic norms, so much so that even a Google search, one that takes no more than a few seconds, is too much to ask. In other words, do they really still think that anyone believes them?
Link: http://www.israelhayom.com/site/newsletter_opinion.php?id=4901
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