Gaza: one of the flocked children [Image Source] |
This Ongoing War..
10 February '15..
Many of us are not fully sensitive to the way our emotional reaction to news stories is a function of how it is reported. The tone of news articles - critical, supportive, cynical, angry, amused - is something that editors, writers and the people who write the headlines and add the pictures understand well. Consumers of the news? Not so much.
Agence France Presse, one of the world's major packagers and syndicators of news reporting and imagery, and the oldest (founded in 1835), provides news outlets throughout the world with many of the stories they publish. From conversations, we sense that the role of the large packagers - including Reuters, Associated Press and Xinhua - is barely comprehended by end-users. But their influence, as newspapers lack the profitability and cash to employ their own reporters in the many (often troubled) locations where news is made, is vast.
So a person might think that with a heavy and growing responsibility for getting those stories right, AFP (which is still entirely owned by the French government) and the others would make efforts to present things in a balanced, objective way, free of editorializing and bias.
Which brings us to a story that AFP syndicated out to its news customers in the last 24 hours. It's datelined Gaza, and describes systematic child abuse carried out yet again, on a colossal scale, by the thugs of certain outlawed terrorist organizations operating in dark Islamist/Moslem Brotherhood-controlled corners of the world, and the outrage from the many organizations, those with the huge budgets and the heart-rending websites and a mandate to speak for the urgent need to protect innocent children, loudly condemning the facts presented in the article.
Actually we're being sarcastic. Today's AFP report, headlined "Gaza youngsters flock to Hamas training camps", does no such thing, though the facts describe a humanitarian disaster of global significance.
(Continue)
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