AP Fact-Checkers and Misleading Half-Truths - by Ricki Hollander

The AP purports to set the record straight on statements by David Friedman to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee during his confirmation hearings for ambassadorship to Israel. But the AP "fact-checker" counters Friedman's fully accurate facts with misleading half-truths.

Ricki Hollander..
CAMERA Media Analyses..
22 February '17..

The Associated Press' Josh Lederman purported to set the record straight on statements by David Friedman to the Senate Foreign Relations Committee during his confirmation hearings for ambassadorship to Israel. Under the rubric of "AP Fact-Check," the author countered fully accurate facts with misleading half-truths. The feature was distributed to and ran on multiple mainstream media outlets.

Below is CAMERA's fact-checking of AP's fact-checker.

1) Lederman takes exception to Mr. Friedman's accurate statements that Palestinians have failed to "end incitement" of violence and about "unwillingness on the part of the Palestinians to renounce terror and accept Israel as a Jewish state."

He counters this by asserting that "Not all the Palestinians are the Same," and presents three arguments, all half truths:

(Continue to Full Post)

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Can You Imagine? AP Editor Flunks Middle East 101

...In sum, Israel’s democracy is so strong that even attempts to challenge that status can’t avoid confirming it. The only thing we ended up learning was that Middle East 101 is far too advanced for the AP.

Seth Mandel..
Commentary Magazine..
25 March '15..

Those of us who write about Middle East politics sometimes joke that the mainstream press is desperately in need of an introductory course on the subject. And now, thanks to the latest effort by the Associated Press, we’re forced to ask: What happens when reporters take Middle East 101–and fail? The AP’s Middle East editor this week tackled the burning question: “Is Israel democratic?” If you know anything at all about the country, you know that this question requires a one-word answer: Yes. The AP, however, thought it was an essay test. And what a disaster it was.

The full headline to AP editor Dan Perry’s piece is “AP Analysis: Is Israel democratic? Not so clear.” Such baldly false smears are part and parcel of the debate, of course. For some reason it’s considered acceptable practice to merely make up stuff about Israel and pass lies off as truth. It comes with the territory of being the world’s one Jewish state. But the timing here is interesting. All that’s really changed regarding Israel is President Obama’s public attitude toward it, in which his hostility toward the country and its people are being broadcast instead of denied.

AP's Instant Incrimination

Shraga Simmons..
Times of Israel..
14 September '12..

We all know the story. An amateurish YouTube video, depicting Muhammad as a fraud and philanderer, touched off riots throughout the Arab world resulting in the savage murder of four Americans in Libya, including US Ambassador Chris Stevens.

Yet one mysterious subplot has received precious little attention: The media’s reckless disregard for getting the story right. Consider:

When the riots began, the first major news blast came from Associated Press, the mammoth wire service who issued this report:

LOS ANGELES (AP) – An Israeli filmmaker based in California went into hiding after his movie attacking Islam’s prophet Mohammed sparked angry assaults by ultra-conservative Muslims… [Sam] Bacile, a California real estate developer who identifies himself as an Israeli Jew, said he believes the movie will help his native land by exposing Islam’s flaws to the world.
AP also reported that the film “was financed with the help of more than 100 Jewish donors.”

So there you have it. Jewish money, and a Jewish filmmaker – an Israeli, in fact, trying to “help his native land” – whose reprehensible film led to the murder of Americans.

This was the world’s “first impression” – amplified by AP’s thousands of subscribing media outlets worldwide.

As we now know, the AP report is a factual train wreck: Sam Bacile does not exist. The real filmmaker is purportedly an Egyptian-American Coptic Christian named Nakoula Basseley Nakoula.

CAMERA - Ha'aretz Leads and AP Follows in Defaming Israel

RH
CAMERA/Snapshots
21 November '11

http://blog.camera.org/archives/2011/11/haaretz_leads_and_ap_follows_i_1.html

Ha'aretz journalists -- with Akiva Eldar frequently leading the pack -- are so eager to publicize controversial stories about Israel that they often rush to press without thoroughly checking out the facts or bothering to get the full story. The mainstream media could not be happier to let the Israeli daily do its dirty work for them. After all, what can be better than using an Israeli source to dig up dirt on Israelis?

Last Friday, Akiva Eldar, Ha'aretz's chief political correspondent, wrote an article alleging that, for the first time, Palestinian land was absorbed by Kibbutz Meirav, an Israeli kibbutz within the country's 1967 borders. The message was clear: Palestinian land was being grabbed not only by so-called "settlers" but by Israelis within the 1949 armistice boundaries.

AP's Diaa Hadid eagerly jumped on Eldar's story, and enhanced it with quotations by anti-settlement activists and Palestinians with an axe to grind against their Israeli neighbors. No one from the Kibbutz was interviewed or cited, because they "weren't immediately available for comment because of the Jewish Sabbath." And obviously Hadid couldn't let a juicy anti-Israel story possibly elude her by taking the time to hear both sides of the controversy or take the risk that the story might be debunked. So she ran with the unsubstantiated claims. And many mainstream media outlets ran her story.

Had she actually bothered to adhere to journalistic norms and get the other side of the story, AP's Hadid would have been told that "the land in question has a long-term lease and actually belonged to neighboring Kibbutz Maaleh Gilboa (not Palestinians)for 25 years." But of course, presenting two sides of a controversy would weaken Hadid and Eldar's defamation of Israel.

To those who are curious about the other side's point of view, see here.

Is it any wonder, with so many journalists more concerned about being the first to expose dirt than about doing their job, that the public is increasingly distrustful of what they read in the mainstream press?

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Double Standard of The Day at the New York Times

Yarden Frankl
Crossing the Yarden
17 January'11

Well, technically it’s an AP story that appears in the New York Times, but that’s not my point.

The article discusses the impact of Ehud Barak announcement that he’s leaving the Labor Party and taking his toys with him. Here’s the part I don’t like:

“Labor has been the sole moderate party in Netanyahu’s coalition, which is otherwise dominated by religious and nationalist parties that oppose major concessions to the Palestinians.”

Now before everyone clicks the comment button to say that I am overreacting — because Netanyahu’s coalition in fact does oppose major concessions to the Palestinians — just think about this: have you ever seen a New York Times article that included language that even remotely sounded like:

…Abbas’ government, which is otherwise dominated by religious and nationalist parties that oppose major concessions to the Israelis.

Of course you haven’t. Is it true? Of course it is. But the fact remains that if you look at which side is more resistant to making concessions, consider that:

(Read full "Double Standard of The Day at the New York Times")

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Media Distortion about Israel - One Example

Daniel Pipes
www.danielpipes.org
04 January '11

Mark Lavie, a long-time Associated Press reporter in Israel, should know a thing or two about the politics in that country. But he writes today at "Israel's Labor: We'll quit if no progress to peace" about tensions in the ruling coalition that

An exit by Labor, a moderate party sitting uncomfortably alongside hawks in the ruling coalition, could undermine Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's parliamentary majority and force an election. That would sideline Mideast peace efforts for months.

These two sentences contain much loaded language ("moderate," "peace efforts") but what's really noteworthy is that Lavie writes later in the same article:

Even if Netanyahu loses Labor's 13 seats, his parliamentary majority would remain intact, though barely. Counting Netanyahu's own Likud Party, the five hawkish parties in his coalition have 61 seats in the 120-seat parliament, a tiny majority even if Labor leaves.

Not only does Lavie contradict himself here – would the government fall or not? – but he makes multiple other errors. For starters, he fails to mention that:

- Netanyahu could invite the National Union, a right-wing party with four seats, into the coalition.

- Narrow coalitions are the rule in Israeli politics and large coaltions like Netanyahu's are the exception.

(Read full "Media Distortion about Israel - One Example")

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AP recasts Palestinian terror war as 'Israeli-Palestinian violence'

Leo Rennert
American Thinker
27 December '10

The Associated Press, in a post-Christmas dispatch, distributed an article from Jerusalem about 2010 turning into a record tourism year for Israel.

One would think that since this calls for a simple rewrite of a Tourism Ministry press release that only deals with numbers of visitors to Israel, the AP would play it straight.

It does not.

Even in what seems at first an innocuous, straightforward bit of news, leave it to some reporter and editor at the AP to inject an anti-Israel poison pill into the dispatch, which found its way into hundreds, perhaps thousands, of media outlets around the world.

In accounting for the upsurge in tourists, the AP contrasts recently improved security with waves of "Israeli-Palestinian violence" in the last decade.

What a neat way to sanitize a Palestinian war terror war against Israel.

At the AP apparently, "intifada" -- a gentle Arabic euphemism for a Palestinian "uprising" that killed more than 1,000 Israeli civilians post-2000 -- is no longer a sufficient disguise to let the Palestinian side off the hook.

(Read full "AP recasts Palestinian terror war as 'Israeli-Palestinian violence'")

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Shattered Lens - Photo Bias Exposed in the Wire Services

A snapshot of how Reuters, AP and AFP/Getty misuse imagery to distort coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Honest Reporting
Media Critiques
02 December '10

(A giant project from Honest Reporting, very thorough, and ongoing. Y.)

Images have unprecedented power to mold public opinion. The three international wire services – the Associated Press, Agence France Press / Getty Images and Reuters – have assumed a central role in presenting images from Israel and the Palestinian territories to the world.

HonestReporting was first became intimately involved in the role of the wire services in photo choice when we exposed Reuters' 2007 calendar gaffe, which followed the Fauxtography affair from the 2006 Lebanon War.

Since then, we have covered numerous instances of photo bias, including a blatantly staged photo of Hamas taken by Reuters photographer Mohammed Salem in 2008. Reuters continues to publish Salem's photographs of the region, including another series of staged images we documented shortly after the Gaza flotilla in June.

Until now, however, nobody has commissioned a study to examine the imagery produced by the wire services to see whether there are any identifiable trends that may indicate bias.

To find out if Israel is being treated fairly by the wire services, we embarked on a three-month in-depth study of how Israel is portrayed by all three wires. This study covers the period that began with the Gaza flotilla on May 31, 2010 and ended with the murder of four Israelis at the hands of Palestinian terrorists on Aug. 31, 2010.

(Read full report)

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Propaganda from the AP

Leo Rennert
American Thinker
23 May '10

It's just a short paragraph. Yet, it is riddled with factual and historical errors -- all part of an egregious anti-Israel bias that undermines millennial Jewish ties and claims to Jerusalem.

It appears in the May 23 edition of the Washington Post, as the last paragraph of a brief item attributed to the Associated Press about U.S.-mediated indirect peace talks between Israel and the Palestinians, the Post's "Digest" feature.

Here is the entire paragraph:

"Israel wants to annex Jewish settlements in the war-won West Bank and East Jerusalem."

How is that wrong? Let us count the ways:

1. For starters, Israel doesn't want or need to annex any part of East Jerusalem. After the 1967 war, when it defeated Egyptian, Syrian and Jordanian armies bent on destroying it, Israel made Jerusalem whole again. Israel formally put an end to 19 years of illegal Jordanian occupation of the eastern sector of the city -- the only time in its entire history that Jerusalem was a divided city. Today, there is nothing left for Israel to "annex." It's been a done deal for more than a generation.

(Read full article)

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AP Photographer Wins Award for Gaza Coverage

CAMERA/Snapshots
22 April '10

AP photographer Khalil Hamra has been awarded the The Robert Capa Gold Medal Award 2009 by the Overseas Press Club for his images of the winter 2008-09 war between Israel and Hamas. The OPC commended Hamra:

Khalil Hamra’s pictures of the Israeli military incursion into Gaza showed exceptional courage and enterprise by a committed local photographer during a sustained and dangerous conflict. His images are close up, powerful and direct and taken at considerable risk due to the nature of the conflict which had combatants mingling amongst the civilian population. Hamra’s personal circumstances are equally compelling: he covered the conflict in spite of concerns about the welfare of his wife, then pregnant with twins.

In December 2008, during the fighting, Snapshots noted that Lenny Ben-David flagged an apparently staged photo by Khalil Hamra of injured children in Gaza:

(Read full post)

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AP: Arab States Bowing To Iran Because Of Israeli Settlement Construction

Omri Ceren
Mere Rhetoric
31 March '10

Jews building homes for their families and schools for their kids? Is there anything it can't do?

The head of the Arab League urged the 22-nation bloc on Saturday to engage Iran directly over concerns about its growing influence in the region and its disputed nuclear program... The push to engage Tehran seems to be at least partly fueled by Arab frustration over Washington's failure to get Israel to back down on plans for more Jewish settlements on land the Palestinians want for a future state. It also suggests that Arab nations are increasingly less likely to align with the U.S. strategy on Iran if they feel they are getting nothing in return in Mideast peace efforts.

This comes courtesy of the AP's Khaled al-Deeb. Because that's why they're doing it. It has nothing to do with how Iran is steadily growing more powerful in the region, forcing millennial-old antagonists like Turkey into their orbit and Finlandizing Arab states one by one. It's that Israelis are building supermarkets in the West Bank and condos in East Jerusalem. Obviously.

The real question is whether it was an editor or al-Deeb himself who inserted the weasel phrase "at least partly" into the copy. Smart money's on the editor, who couldn't really cut out the entire analysis section but also couldn't get over how transparent and stupid the stunt was.

(Read full post)
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Checkpoint “misery” exaggerated by the AP

Meryl Yourish
Yourish.com
21 February '10

This get-out-your-hankie story is the latest profile by the AP of the horrors the Palestinians have to go through—all, of course, caused by Israel. This one is an AP correspondent who spent a week (five days, actually) going through the Qalandia crossing into Jerusalem. Jerusalem has been the site of several terrorist attacks in recent years, and terror attack attempts are up sharply recently.

But here, I think, are the most relevant facts in the entire article. The reporter followed five different Palestinians on five different days. He starts with this woe-is-them description of how long the crossing takes:

Until a decade ago, his commute from his West Bank village 20 kilometers (12 miles) north would have taken less than hour. But after the Palestinian uprising broke out in 2000, border checkpoints started going up. The Qalandia crossing grew steadily more arduous, and now Abu Jalil has to get up at 4:30 a.m.

So his commute was less than an hour. The reporter doesn’t say how much less, but he does let us know how much time was added to the commute:

(Read full post)
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AP Photo Caption Errs on Roads "For Jews"

TS
CAMERA/Snapshots
30 December 09

Rehashing an old canard (see here and here) that there are West Bank roads that are for "Jews only," an AP photo caption from yesterday reads:

FILE - In this Friday, Jan. 4, 2008 file photo, Palestinian, Israeli and foreign protesters run from tear gas fired by Israeli troops, bottom, during a demonstration on Highway 443 near the West Bank village of Beit Horon outside Jerusalem. Israel's Supreme Court ordered the military on Tuesday Dec. 29, 2009 to allow Palestinians to travel on the part of Highway 443 that runs through the West Bank, handing Palestinians their biggest victory yet against Israel's practice of reserving some roads for Jews. (AP Photo/Sebastian Scheiner)

As documented earlier by CAMERA, while there are some West Bank roads prohibited to Palestinian traffic, there are no roads either in Israel or the West Bank reserved only for Jews, as this caption claims. The difference is significant -- while most Palestinians may not travel on Highway 443 (this will change in the next five months) and certain other West Bank roads, Israeli Arabs -- Christians and Muslims -- most certainly may.

AP's Amy Teibel accurately described the restriction in her article yesterday, saying that "Israel has created a system of roads in the West Bank restricted to Israeli use." Moreover, AP corrected this very same error last year.

See here and here for other recent AP photo miscaptions.

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