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An example of ‘unbiased’ news reporting from the AP:

WASHINGTON (AP) – Congress signaled its disapproval of Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad with a vote Tuesday to tighten sanctions against his government and a call to designate his Revolutionary Guard a terrorist group.

The swift rebuke was a rare display of bipartisan cooperation in a Congress bitterly divided on the Iraq war. It reflected lawmakers’ long-standing nervousness about Tehran’s intentions in the region, particularly toward Israel—a sentiment fueled by the pro-Israeli lobby whose influence reaches across party lines in Congress…

The House passed, by a 397-16 vote, a proposal by [Tom] Lantos, D-Calif., aimed at blocking foreign investment in Iran, in particular its lucrative energy sector. The bill would specifically bar the president from waiving U.S. sanctions… [my emphasis]

The article goes on to add that

The legislative push came a day after Ahmadinejad defended Holocaust revisionists, questioned who carried out the Sept. 11 attacks and declared homosexuals didn’t exist in Iran in a tense question-and- answer session at Columbia University.

And let’s not forget that Iran is developing nuclear weapons. Does Congress need an Israel lobby to tell it these things?

Technorati Tags: Israel, AP, media bias, Israel lobby, Iran, Ahmadinejad, Lantos

From today’s Jerusalem Post:

A Cairo court sentenced the editors of four outspoken tabloids to a year in prison for insulting President Hosni Mubarak and his ruling party, judicial officials said Thursday.

Imagine if Israeli journalists could be jailed for insulting PM Olmert! There would be no news media, only full jails (the same goes for Americans and our president).

I thought of this yesterday while listening to a truly outrageous program on left-wing radio station KPFA, Berkeley. The commentator went on and on about the corporate stranglehold on the media and how it suppressed the ‘truth’ about 9/11, which in his view was that the WTC was not destroyed by planes piloted by radical Saudi Islamists, but rather was blown up by the Bush administration in order to give it an excuse to suppress domestic dissent and attack Muslim countries.

And this morning I read, in my local ‘corporate’ newspaper a column by Amy Goodman (also a KPFA personality), in which she praised Jimmy Carter for pointing out the ‘fact’ that Israel is an apartheid state because there are “roads that Palestinians are not permitted to drive on”.

By this I presume she meant the bypass roads in the West Bank, built to connect settlements to each other and to Israel proper, because Jewish vehicles driving on normal roads were subject to stoning at best, and very often shooting and firebombing — sometimes with multiple deaths as a result.

So actually, the racists here were the Palestinians, who did not permit Jews to travel, on pain of death. The Israeli response was to build roads, in some places surrounded by walls and fences, which did not have offramps in Palestinian towns. Apartheid!

Anyway, Amy Goodman can say what she likes, despite the corporate character of the media and the supposedly great power of the Jewish Lobby. And in Israel, Danny Rubinstein can say what he wants about his country, too, even if it borders on treason, and still keep his job.

Try it in Egypt or in Saudi Arabia, or indeed in any Arab country.

!שנה טובה

Technorati Tags: Israel, Media, Amy Goodman

Recently I was looking at reports of outrageously unfair media treatment of Israel, such as HonestReporting on the UK Independent’s Mark Steel, or Camera on Christiane Amanpour’s CNN documentary. And another blow will almost certainly fall soon, with the upcoming release of “Jimmy Carter Man From Plains“, a documentary about Carter’s recent book tour.

HR, Camera, and others do a good job of exposing the bias and, often, the outright lies. But the damage is done, and the people who read Mark Steel, for example, are not likely to check HR’s website.

There is a veritable industry producing anti-Israel material, films, TV programs, articles, books, websites, etc. It’s impossible to counteract this only by responding to them. It’s necessary to tell the true story pro-actively, and it must be done in the most effective — that is, emotionally powerful — way.

Probably the best way to do this is by the visual media, film and TV. Nothing else has the emotional impact or the reach.

Israel has a well-developed film industry, but most of its products are aimed at the domestic market, and many of them present a dark vision of Israel or have a definite left-wing slant.

I am not suggesting that Israeli studios should start cranking out propaganda films. What I would like to see are films aimed at the foreign market which will simply tell the truth, from an Israeli — OK, a Zionist — point of view.

I would like to see feature films, documentaries, TV programs, etc. The media are hungry for content, why can’t we give them some?

What needs to happen is that the conventional wisdom — the everyday assumptions about the Israeli-Arab conflict that most people make when they read or hear about events — needs to change. The tendentious nonsense written by Mark Steel about how Israel does not recognize the Palestinians’ right to exist came from somewhere, and I don’t think Hamas paid him to write it.

Steel won’t read my blog, and if he did he’d dismiss it as just more Israeli propaganda rubbish. Having watched TV in the UK, I know what he and others are seeing on a day-in day-out basis, and I’m not surprised at the assumptions that underlie his writing.

Turning things upside down will not be easy. It will be expensive, which means that the Government of Israel and the Diaspora Jewish community will have to bear some of the burden, at least at first; and they will have to do so with sensitivity and the understanding that the creative people will have to be allowed enough freedom to do what they want.

But after all, the Arabs and their friends managed to change perceptions worldwide starting in 1967. Isn’t it time for the pendulum to swing back in our direction?

Technorati Tags: Israel, media