Brith Sholom Media Watch Alert #735, 2/1/15

To: Brith Sholom Media Watch Subscribers
From: Jerry Verlin, Editor (jverlin1234@verizon.net)
Subj: Brith Sholom Media Watch Alert #735, 2/1/15

WHILE YOU STAND ON ONE LEG: City newspapers directly participate in anti-Israel media bias through imbalanced-headlines and photo selection. One given such headline, including one this week in my hometown Philly Inquirer (Inq), or photo may not attract much notice, but if you assemble one after another over the course of, say, a year, a course of conduct emerges. I try to show one this week. Come see if I did.

This Week In The Inq: One more Swift Kick; Too Small to Take Umbrage?

For imbalanced text in its wire service news articles, a city newspaper can perhaps unsmilingly claim “we were only publishing Reuters” (or the AP, NY Times, or whatever). Not so for the local paper’s headlining of those news articles and the photos which it selects to adorn them.

The case that I make to you this week is that our hometown Philly Inquirer (Inq) repeatedly phrases headlines and selects photos for its wire service Israel news articles that are derisive of our Jewish homeland of Israel and thereby disrespectful of us. I start with an example from This Week In The Inq, indeed this morning. Too trivial an insult over which to take umbrage? Perhaps, but I bolster this instance with Inq headlines and photos through 2014, shining a light, I think, on a course of reporting from which we avert our eyes at our peril.

This morning’s (Sun, 2/1/15, A6) Inq carried a 1-paragraph AP “Around the World” squib which the Inq headlined as

Israel: Troops Shoot 2 Palestinians

What would you glean from that? That the reason that these Israeli troops shot these two people was because they were “Palestinians.” If there was something more headline-relevant to their being shot than their being “Palestinian,” any newspaper would have headlined that headline-relevant fact, right? Well, take a look. Here’s that 1-paragraph Inq AP article’s lead:

The Israeli military says troops have shot a pair of Palestinians who were throwing firebombs at Israeli vehicles in the West Bank.

Here’s how the non-rightwing Times of Israel headlined its article: “Army Shoots Dead Palestinian Throwing Firebomb at Car.”

The Times of Israel article quoted the IDF that “the section of road in question had suffered dozens of rock-throwing and fire-bombing attacks over the past year.” The AP’s squib ended: “The military has recently beefed up security in the West Bank after a Jewish girl was seriously wounded by a firebomb that set her family car on fire.” Times of Israel was a bit more descriptive: “Shapira [the 11-year-old girl] suffered third-degree burns over much of her body and face in the attack and was initially described as being in critical condition,” which has since “steadily improved.” But such is the context in which the Philadelphia Inquirer informed its readers this morning that the headline-worthy fact was “Israel: Troops Shoot 2 Palestinians.”

Likewise relevant to media portrayal of Jews defending themselves against terror is a Friday Times of Israel analysis of a poll taken of Britons last summer. It found that Britons view Israel more unfavorably than any country on earth, save North Korea. Iran, Pakistan and Nigeria rounded out the top five. The vast increase in Israel’s unfavorability rating came “presumably in response to the controversial military campaign in Gaza and the civilian casualties it caused, which were prominent in the news at the time.”

2014 Headline and Photo Gems in the Inq

Under “H – Headlines: Not Always What Happened” in Lee’s and my book, “Pressing Israel: Media Bias Exposed From A-to-Z,” we cite fifteen examples of Philly Inquirer headlines with which the Inq, it seems to us, went out of its way to mock or demean the Jewish homeland of Israel. Many of these downplayed Arab attacks on Israeli civilians (“Two Israeli Factory Guards Die” for their being executed point-blank by an Arab who snuck into Israel) or wrongly depicted Israel as the aggressor (“Israeli Army Shoots Four Palestinians” [sound familiar?], regarding whom the Inq’s article quoted Hamas as being its members “on a jihad mission”). There were many further instances in 2014. E.g.:

*** Last November, meat-cleaver-wielding Palestinian Arabs broke into a Jerusalem synagogue during morning prayers and hacked to death four rabbis. Our Inq headlined (11/19/14, A1, 8): “Palestinians Kill Four Jerusalem Worshippers,” not too bad for an Inq in identifying the perpetrators if not the victims, given that Muslims, Christians and Jews all pray [at least in some places] in Jerusalem. But that was our Inq’s headline back on article continuation page 8. The Inq’s front-page headline – “4 Jerusalem Worshippers Slain” – managed to identify neither the perpetrators nor victims. And note that while this morning’s “2 Palestinians” were killed because they were throwing firebombs, not because they were “Palestinians,” the 4 meat-cleavered rabbis were targeted precisely because they were Jews.

*** A related headline penchant of our beloved Inq is to headline nationality of Westerners harmed for whatever justification by Israel. One 2014 instance of this occurred last February with an Inq headline (2/24/14, A6): “Israel: American Inmate Dies In Raid,” to which BSMW appended in that week’s edition “[not exactly].” The Inq’s own AP piece led: ““A U.S.-born inmate shot and wounded three guards Sunday before being killed by a SWAT team that responded to the attack.” 

*** Another 2014 instance occurred in November. Just 10 days after headlining “4 Jerusalem Worshippers Slain,” pointedly not including that three of the four Jerusalem Rabbis (a/k/a “Jerusalem Worshippers”) were jointly American and Israeli citizens, our beloved Inq headlined (11/29/14, A4): “Israeli Troops Wound Italian.” There was a Palestinian Arab riot in Samaria, in which this Italian participant was wounded by IDF fire “after tear gas and other crowd-control measures failed to stop them from burning tires and throwing rocks.” He was wounded because he was participating in an out-of-control rock-throwing riot, not because he didn’t look “Palestinian.”

*** And compare the Inq not headlining its 6/15/14 Washington Post article on the three kidnapped [and later-known murdered] Israeli kids that one of the three, per the Inq’s WP article, “is a dual Israeli-American citizen,” versus the Inq pointedly headlining on 4/18/13 as “Palestinian-American Teen Gets Two-Week Prison Term” [wow, that’s international news] an article on a Palestinian Arab kid of whom “the military said the youth threw rocks at vehicles on a highway and at Israeli forces on several occasions.”

As BSMW commented last year at the time, the Inq’s photo selection during last summer’s Israel-Hamas war was worse than one-sided. The Inq went out of its way to stick it to Israel.

*** The Inq’s photo accompanying its 7/23/14 article on a lone Hamas rocket landing a mile from Israel’s international airport causing temporary international shunning of Israel’s airport was “Smoke and fire rises over Gaza City.”

*** September 24, 2014’s BSMW #716 commented as follows:

Compare the clarity-versus-vagueness of these two Inq headlines. On 7/14/14, the Inq ran a front-page Washington Post article it headlined: “Tens of Thousands Flee Homes in Gaza.” A4-continuation page Inq headline: “Thousands Flee Homes in Gaza.” On 8/26/14, the Inq ran a page A6 AP article reporting that “tens of thousands of Israelis have fled the area [southern Israel near the Gaza Strip] in nearly two months of fighting.” If you were expecting an Inq headline of “Tens of Thousands Flee Homes in Southern Israel,” you haven’t been paying attention for these past 716 weeks. The Inq headlined: “Israelis Leaving Gaza Border,” which ambiguously could have suggested to readers that the IDF was pulling back troops from the border, not that Israeli civilians were fleeing their homes that were as much within Israel, inside Israel, not on “the border,” as Gazans were fleeing their homes not “on the border” but within Gaza.

Our beloved hometown Inq’s photo selection for this page 6 (as opposed to page 1 for Gazans fleeing their homes) article on “Israelis Leaving Gaza Border”? “Firefighters inspect the rubble of a three-story residential building after an Israeli air strike in Beit Lahiya, in the northern Gaza Strip….” [I don’t make this stuff up]

Many years ago, before anti-Israel media bias became recognized as the reality that is acknowledged today, I introduced a resolution on it to be presented and voted upon at the fraternal order Brith Sholom’s annual convention those days in the Catskills. It was opposed by some leaders in the organization as “making us a laughing stock in the Jewish community.” The resolution nonetheless passed (as it did annually thereafter during the days of the “resolutions committee”), and not long thereafter one of the “laughing stock” opposers came up to me and asked “How do they get away with such stuff?” They get away with it partly because we avert our eyes from it, and partly because a lot of it is low level stuff – “Israel: Troops Shoot 2 Palestinians” – that becomes apparent, poisonous and menacing only when seen, not as here-and-there individual imbalanced headlines and photo selections, but as repeated occurrences of such disdain and derision.

Many years ago also, I had three-fold-proof I was not middle-aged: I was on a softball team, I didn’t wear bifocals, and so far as I knew I wasn’t a grandfather. I began this 2015 January-February-straddling weekend by breaking my bifocals. I spent yesterday afternoon enjoyably watching my grandsons compete for their school, that used to be called a junior high school, in a many-school swimming meet. One won one heat by several seconds, and came in fourth in another stroke five-one hundredths of a second (a difference you can’t see without bifocals) behind the third-place kid. And February 2015 is a month I’m scheduled for a quite millstone birthday, well past what that highest of human authorities, the United States Government, defines as past middle-age. I hope to keep commenting on my hometown Inq’s anti-Israel imbalances as long as it keeps churning them out, but You-Who-Put-Up-With-Me-Weekly need to be missionaries. Spread the word about what’s not the Gospel, and ask your colleagues and friends to subscribe to our media watch.

Regards,
Jerry