Commentary Magazine..
04 August '14..
Last week, the Jewish Telegraphic Agency posed an interesting question to the New York Times: Why isn’t it publishing any pictures of Hamas fighters in Gaza? The answer from the Times and from other media outlets about the lack of any depictions of Hamas terrorists or rocket launchings speaks volumes about the biased nature of much of the coverage of the war.
The answer from the Times communications shop was candid if not particularly helpful. According to their spokesman, out of the hundreds of images of the fighting filed from Gaza by their photographers, there wasn’t a single clear one of one of the two sides in the conflict. The same appears to be true of all the other major news outlets, not to mention the broadcast networks and cable news channels operating in Gaza in large numbers. How is it that we have yet to see a single photo or video of Hamas personnel launching rockets at Israel even though we know that has happened literally thousands of times in the last few weeks? Is it that the intrepid war correspondents and video teams just happened to miss the chance to take the picture every single time the rockets went up? Or is there some other explanation?
There is simply no way that the battalions of journalists wandering around in the relatively tight confines of Gaza could have possibly missed every time a rocket was launched. Nor are the excuses being put forward by some journalists when asked about this astonishing gap in their coverage credible. We know that Hamas has thousands of armed fighters in Gaza.
It is true that most spend as much time as possible in the underground city of tunnels and bunkers that Hamas has constructed at great expense underneath the narrow strip. But they are not vampires. It is possible to take a picture of them when they emerge from their lairs to launch attacks on their enemies or to indiscriminately shoot rockets at Israeli cities. Indeed, unless the foreign journalists in Gaza are making a concerted effort to avoid doing so it would be hard for them to have contrived not to bump into some of them in the course of their efforts to cover instances of Israeli fire causing Palestinian casualties. Since the Israelis are returning fire at Hamas personnel either launching rockets or conducting other military operations, it would be next to impossible for them not to have noticed their presence.
The answer is fairly obvious: despite denials, foreign journalists in Gaza take great care not to depict Hamas military actions because to do so would be to jeopardize their ability to continue to report from Gaza or, even worse, invite attacks from these terrorists. This is not the first time we’ve seen this sort of thing happening. A generation ago, Thomas Friedman and others wrote about the difficulty of reporting accurately about the Palestine Liberation Organization when Yasir Arafat’s terrorists exercised their reign of terror in southern Lebanon and parts of Beirut. The same was true in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq when CNN defended its exclusive niche in Baghdad by failing to tell the truth about what that evil regime was doing. Subsequent admissions from CNN about making tough decisions after Saddam’s fall make the network’s current disclaimers about its reporters and camera operators being subjected to intimidation ring false.
In saying this, I’m not castigating those reporters who are trying to report on the fighting in Gaza. It’s dangerous work in the best of circumstances and who are we to ask any of them to dare Hamas to kill them by taking pictures that would give the lie to the Islamists’ attempt to have the world believe the only thing going on in the strip is Israeli aggression and cruelty.
But that’s the reason why this is a topic that needs to be honestly addressed by the networks and publications that are helping to spread these talking points. If, as MSNBC’s Joe Scarborough argued last week, the Jewish state is losing friends because of the pictures of horror emanating from Gaza, it’s fair to ask why those depictions are never balanced with footage or stills of the actions of terrorists inviting return fire from the Israelis.
To state this fact is not to deny that the suffering of civilians in Gaza is real. Nor can or should anyone claim that the injuries being inflicted on civilians by fire from Israeli aircraft or troops, including many children, is anything but horrific. There is no doubt that Israeli troops, like those American soldiers and marines operating under similarly restrictive rules of engagement in Iraq and Afghanistan, sometimes make mistakes. But to tell the story of this war without including the photographic and video proof of the way Hamas deliberately endangers Palestinian civilians is a travesty. Those who lecture Israel on the damage done to its image from the pictures of Palestinian children should at least have the guts to demand that those reporters and photographers working in Gaza either start doing their jobs or admit that they are either being intimidated from doing so or are engaging in biased journalism.
Link: http://www.commentarymagazine.com/2014/08/04/the-missing-pictures-of-gaza-media-bias-hamas/
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