Sunday, April 10, 2011

Not to bash the Times, but...

The image alone, from the Times' "Israel Scours Palestinian Village in Hunt for Killers", looks right out of a movie.

A Palestinian girl, Rabah Abd al-Karim, 6, with members of her family  at the doorway to her house in Awarta, West Bank, that was searched repeatedly by Israeli soldiers during a door to door hunt for the killers of a family in neighboring Itamar.

It's unsettling to read about raids of Palestinian houses, "children crying...in fright...of" Israeli soldiers, a "dingy, sparsely furnished...house, with bare cement-block walls" where soldiers "broke all the closets and the family’s first, newly acquired washing machine". Unnecessarily brutal disruption of civilian life is shocking.


Yet I was even more shocked to see that the Times considers the hunt for the Fogels' killers in itself an emotional saga, a human interest story that the murder never was. Let us be totally honest: There was no equivalent article that described the Fogel funeral; no pretty imagery like "dingy", "sparsely furnished", "bare cement-block walls"; no similarly tearful descriptions of Israeli children dealing with post-attack trauma.


It seems as if the story of the children (albeit settlers) who lost their parents and siblings isn't especially compelling to Times readers; people would much rather read about the children who lost their newly acquired washing machine.


~mango passion fruit tea~

3 comments:

  1. Its so distressing to see that the media has not only played a bias, but is feeding into meaningless news in order to get more ratings. Also,this picture is taking the context of the political situation and created an an emotional and political bias.

    ReplyDelete
  2. Agreed - this is a clear case of media bias. This article screams that it is "playing on peoples emotions."

    ReplyDelete
  3. Not only are Israelis pretty bad at propaganda, especially when compared to the PA, but if major newspapers like the NYT are promoting the tragic life of a single side, we should not be surprised that most people believe the real victims are the Palestinians.

    Having soldiers enter/search your house is most probably a weird and frightening experience, especially for children. But these are Israeli soldiers; they constitute what is probably the most professional and ethical army in the world! And like you said, we should not lose sight of why the soldiers have to search the village in the first place.

    But of course, the NYT—not even willing to publish Godstone’s new perspective—is not going to provide a balanced point of view. It’s upsetting.

    ReplyDelete