If it doesn’t fit the tightly wound narrative that the media cling to, they will either dismiss it, or spin the story until it conforms.
The Old Media is horrific, you only have to witness what James O’Keefe is doing with the NYT to see just how malignant of the problem actually is. Fake news has become their legacy.
Former AP Correspondent Confirms Anti-Israel Media Bias
International media skews coverage of Israel, a top AP foreign correspondent told a gathering of journalists at this week’s Christian Media Summit in Jerusalem.
“The way that Israel is portrayed by the foreign press is not only broken, there are times when a talented but inexperienced reporter who has been assigned to cover Israel will get in front of a TV camera and literally bluff his/her way through a story with a straight face,” Matti Friedman, a prominent former reporter for The Associated Press (AP), told a gathering of Christian journalists from around the world at this week’s Christian Media Summit in Jerusalem.
Despite the fact that his personal politics run to the left of the spectrum, Friedman admitted that he refused to follow the overwhelmingly liberal international media herd in Israel, which, in the aftermath of the Six Day War, collectively decided that the ongoing simplistic narrative would be, “If Israel ends the occupation of the West Bank [Judea and Samaria] and Gaza, there would be peace. As a former IDF soldier, the gap between what I was writing, as part of the narrative and the reality that I knew as a soldier was too wide for me to accept, so I left AP.”
Friedman added, “Anyone who lives here knows that there’s no ongoing Palestinian-Israel conflict. That’s fiction. There is a much broader regional conflict in the region which includes Iran, Hezbollah, Hamas, Syria, Lebanon of which Israel’s role in all this is one small part of a bigger dynamic.” Friedman pointed out that the skewed coverage of the so-called on-going “violence in Israel” is borne out by eye-opening statistics. “Last year, the total number of violent deaths across Israel including terror attacks, domestic disputes etc. was only 18. In Jacksonville, Florida a small American city perceived to be quiet and safe, 119 people were killed in a violent manner. Journalists covering Israel have decided to create a reality that doesn’t always match what is really happening around them.”
‘Persecution of Christians in the Middle East Under-reported’
In follow-up panels exploring this hot button issue, Chris Mitchell, the longtime Jerusalem Bureau Chief for the Christian Broadcast Network, claimed that the foreign media in Israel and the Western media in general “refuses to report that religious conflict is at the heart of what is going in and around Israel.”
