Soccer Dad

Haveil havalim daily edition 08/10/2006

Haveil Havalim is the weekly Jewish/Israel blogging carnival. The most recent edition is here.

Since I originated the carnival, I've adopted the name for a daily edition that I will try to produce during the war against Hezbollah, Mondays through Thursdays. Unlike the weekly edition, the daily edition will be broken down into three sections. In Depth, Regular Stuff and Assignment Desk. In Depth will be an issue that I wish to explore. Regular Stuff will be a linkfest, though not as extensive as the weekly edition. Assignment desk will be a topic or project that I'm suggesting other bloggers or e-mailers explore. I'll be happy to publish links to or publish e-mails from anyone who responds.

IN DEPTH: Jack Kelly writes of the recent media meltdown

It's often been said that truth is the first casualty in war. But it shouldn't be the news media that kills it.

The recent Reuters unraveling really goes to the heart of how Israel's war against Iranian proxy is being (mis-)represented by the media. It should be cause for massive media introspection. And yet ... it took the Washington Post three days to do a story on the issue. And even then it wasn't front page news. I'm glad that they got their magazine critic to interview Charles Johnson in Blogger takes aim at news media and makes a direct hit. Instread of taking a larger look it turns the story into Charles Johnson.

The exposure of the doctored airstrike photo was a coup for Johnson and his four-year-old political blog, Little Green Footballs. Make that a second coup, of sorts.

In September 2004, not long after "60 Minutes II" seemed to offer damning revelations about President Bush's service in the Texas Air National Guard, Johnson was at the forefront of bloggers who raised questions about the CBS report. (Johnson used the Microsoft Word program to retype the memos used in the report and found that his computer could reproduce the same typefaces and line breaks that Dan Rather had said were produced by a manual typewriter in the mid-1970s.) The incident became a historic debacle for the network and contributed to Rather's retirement from the "CBS Evening News" anchor chair.

Little Green Football's "Reutersgate" and "Rathergate" scalps share a key characteristic: They stem from Johnson's skepticism of, if not outright hostility toward, the mainstream news media (or as some Little Green Football visitors like to refer to them when they post comments, "the lamestream media")

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But there's another side. Wouldn't you know it? There's Ibrahim Hooper.

Not everyone, though, is a fan. Ibrahim Hooper, spokesman for the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a civil rights organization often vilified on Johnson's blog, calls Little Green Footballs "a vicious, anti-Muslim hate site . . . that has unfortunately become popular."

The irony, Hooper says, is that if the same kind of "hatred" that appears on LGF appeared on Muslim sites, it soon would be used by LGF's fans to justify their worldview.

Of course we need balance. The terror apologizing "civil rights" organization CAIR has to be called for comment. Calling CAIR a civil rights organization is part of the problem that LGF is consistently criticizing.

So instead of doing an in depth look at media bias the Washington Post turns the Reuters photograph story into a human interest story about Charles Johnson. (While the article mentions that some LGF commenters have been investigated for threats against CAIR it mentions nothing about Charles Johnson having been threatened by a Reuters employee.)

Gina Cobb (in a different context) writes

And remember always that the news you are being fed is filtered through rose-colored glasses for terrorists and sewage-colored glasses for Israel and the United States. Take off the glasses and visit the blogosphere for a more complete and accurate picture. Don't worry -- if one blog sends you in the wrong direction on a given issue, the next blog will straighten it back out. We are our own army of fact checkers.

If you need one more sign that the media doesn't get it, did you see that Mike Wallace calls President Ahmadinijad an "impressive fellow." (According to CBS, excerpts from the interview will first be available later today.)

UPDATE: Time Magazine's Reuters' Altered Photos: Overhyped? Dangerous? Both by JAMES PONIEWOZIK also shows this cluelessness.

And every time a straight-news journalist alters a fact—even something as picayune as the color of a bomb blast or the number of flares fired from a plane—it convinces people that the media must lie about big things as well. All facts become suspect, all information becomes relative, and you might as well believe whatever your gut tells you, because the news is invariably driven by its own bias, which is, invariably, against you.

Actually the anti-Israel bias is quite real. Media organizations routinely give the benefit of the doubt to Israel's enemies and question Israel. Information is relative. News organizations are limited, they can't possibly cover every single angle. The angles they choose are very telling. Just because the bias isn't blatant like altering a photograph, it doesn't mean that its any less real.

And here's a nice observation by Michael Rubin :

But Erlanger’s blast from the past—as well as Ricks’ comments from this past weekend—reflect a greater problem among many journalists when it comes to the Middle East. Too often they highlight the political and discount the ideological, especially when analyzing the Islamic Republic of Iran and its proxies. They underestimate the difficulties and dangers posed by Islamist militias and states. All this talk in the last decade of reformers and pragmatists versus hardliners was a red herring, because the ideology to which all subscribed overshadowed their factionalism. The presence of divisions, whether in Hamas, Hizbullah, or the Islamic Republic is irrelevant. It may be comforting to think the Islamic Republic of Iran and Hizbullah represent political problems that can be dealt with through diplomacy alone, or that ordinary citizens and civil society can be empowered without moral if not financial support, but reality isn’t about comfort.

REGULAR STUFF:
The Hashmonean finds some media stars he likes.

SerAndEZ.MordyS reports on volunteer firefighters who have gone to Israel to help.

House of Joy gives a snapshot of the concerns permeating Israeli society.

Crosscurrents lists a number of Chareidi organizations helping out in Israel here and here.

There's one more day for the Elder challenge Part II.

ASSIGNMENT DESK: No assignment today. I appreciate Cozy Corner's participation, but there doesn't seem to be much other interest in the Assignment Desk. So I'll likely retire it.

Technorati Tags: Blog carnivals, haveil havalim, Israel, Judaism, Hezbollah, Lebanon, Haveil Havalim Daily.

Posted by SoccerDad at August 10, 2006 4:49 AM