Soccer Dad: Tom's Ventin'

August 2, 2004

Tom's Ventin'

Tom Fenton, a correspondent for CBS Radio who(according to his employer) is "...in his fourth decade with CBS News" wrote a recent screed about the media portrayal of the Middle East. Citing a study by the Glasgow University Media Group (excerpts available here) Fenton claims that skewed reporting leads people not to understand what's going on in the Middle East.
According to Fenton television news uses loaded words that make the population forget that Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands is the source of the conflict. For example, he bemoans the fact that the word "martyr" is often used to describe Palestinians.
I went to the BBC website, since its television coverage is one of the biased media sources that Fenton cited. I searched on the word martyr. Most of the news stories were about the Middle East. I did a (non-scientific) check on the stories. Of the ones I saw, either the reference wsa to the Al Aqsa Martyr's brigade or the martyr was someone who was described that (e.g. Dr. Rantisi) by his own followers. Why martyr would be a loaded term, when the Palestinians use it as a positive self-description is beyond me.
Going back to Fenton's first complaint that people don't know that "settlers" are Israeli, I searched that term. Except for one article, they all referred to Israeli settlers! And lest Fenton be worried that it didn't cast the "settlers" in a sufficiently negative light there was one reference to "settlers" poisoning a well. The report does not mention that the IDF supplied water to those who were affected by the poisoned well and later the BBC didn't report that it now appears that the poisoning turned out not to have been done by "settlers" but rather by Arabs involved in a feud.
(Though it doesn't show up in a search of "settler" the item about the killing of the Hatuel family refers to Tali Hatuel as a "pregnant settler".) After my little experiment it's hard to believe that anyone getting their news from the BBC would fail to know that only Israelis are settlers.
I bet that if you did searches on the BBC site, you'd similarly find that few, if any of the charges made by the study or Fenton hold up.
And a search on the term "terrorist" yielded precisely no results from Israel on the first page.
The BBC does use loaded terms, but they cut exactly opposite way from the way the Glasgow study charges.
How a man with 4 decades of experience could fail to question the dubious assertions of the study he cited reflects poorly upon him and the organization that employs him. Journalists after all are supposed to be skeptical. Tom Fenton took a skewed anti-Israel faux study and passed it off as credible.
HonestReporting.com previously debunked the study. Media Backspin, (HonestReporting's blog, mentions a refutation of the Glasgow study and also mentions the Tom Fenton article crediting yours truly.)
Crossposted on Israpundit and Soccer Dad.