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The messengers are being shot again. The Daily Telegraph columnist Barbara Amiel has opened fire on war correspondents reporting from Israel, accusing them of bringing bad news. She says they have "abandoned balanced reporting", "ignored the relatively heavy Israeli casualties", published Palestinian rumours about Israeli "massacres" and adopted a generally anti-Semitic agenda - "many of them have been doing the work of Goebbels without bothering to wear the brown uniform identifying their agenda".
She caught in her sniper sights Sam Kiley of The Standard, Janine di Giovanni of The Times and Orla Guerin of the BBC. Kiley, according to Ms Amiel, had given up balanced reporting in favour of stories documenting "what his preferred informants call Israel's 'staggering brutality'."
Janine di Giovanni "seems to see Sharon's efforts to clean out the murderous thugs in Jenin camp as Israel's excuse to attack children with chickenpox". Orla Guerin, writing in the Daily Mail, had concentrated on anecdotes about how frightening it was to be stopped by Israeli soldiers in Manger Square.
Now wait a minute. If Ms Amiel is right then three distinguished and experienced war correspondents have conspired to create a culture of anti-Israeli reporting in the British media. Isn't it much more likely that they are reporting what they have seen and experienced and it is the essence of those reports that have upset Ms Amiel and her--no doubt genuinely-held--beliefs.
No one--least of all the war correspondents involved-- claims that the reporting from war zones is always balanced, accurate and fair. But Ms Amiel's suggestion that anyone wanting to know what is really going on in Israel should log on to the Israel Defence Force's website has got to be a joke. "It is a government source, of course," she writes, "but journalists relied on the American military for information on Afghanistan."
Yes, but there were few alternatives because the American military itself had denied war correspondents access to the fighting. (In any case, looking to the Americans for "best practice" war reporting is not a good idea. They had so run down their pool of war correspondents that when the fighting in Afghanistan broke out the NBC had to send to Islamabad Dr. Bob Arnot, its "diet-and-wellness" reporter.)
Denying reporters access to the action has not, until now, been the Israeli way. Old-time British correspondents who covered the Israeli-Arab wars since 1967 spoke admiringly of the help and openness they encountered from their Israeli escorting officers.
Today they are kept by force from any area the IDF says is off-limits. They are fired on and harassed. Their press cars are rammed by APCs and bulldozers, their film footage is confiscated, their press cards torn up, they are treated in an arrogant and overbearing manner and they fear for their lives. Is it any wonder that they believe, rightly or wrongly, that the Israelis have something to hide, that Sam Kiley's stories of a "brutal conquest" in Jenin are true and that the Israelis have turned the refugee camp into rubble?
Or is such a view unique to the war correspondents? Ms Amiel says yes. She writes: "The media seem to have taken the vocabulary of a 'theatre' of war literally. . . and believe this is a production in which they should have a lead role." This in an unfair accusation and ignores the fact that over the past three years the late and greatly-lamented Freedom Forum, an American-sponsored think tank at Marble Arch, spent many hours discussing the role, purpose and ethics of war correspondents.
More than 200 editors, producers, reporters, cameramen and media executives looked at ways of improving their performance, of finding new and ethical means of informing and enlightening audiences in today's increasingly violent, complex and interdependent world. One of the correspondents singled out by Ms Amiel, Janine di Giovanni, was a regular at these meetings.
One of the topics was the concept of balance and objectivity. Paul Taylor, then diplomatic editor of Reuters, pointed out that "Objectivity is not a state, it's a goal, a process, a daily dialectic, and we're constantly debating it, as we should be."
Ms Amiel might like to note that conservative press critics in the United States, who, like her have berated journalists for their bias, have since 11 September attacked them for their objectivity, demanding that they should be more patriotic instead of neutral.
The practice of shooting the messenger because the message is unpalatable is by no means new. Young American war correspondents in Vietnam turned against the United States because of the manner in which it was prosecuting the war--a situation with many parallels to the Israel.
The Pentagon blamed the messengers and lent on American media bosses to send out older correspondents who had "been on side" in Korea to balance what they saw as biased reporting. They did their patriotic best--Marguerite Higgins wrote an article attacking the young correspondents in much the same tenor as has Ms Amiel. But history shows that the younger reporters were right and the truth triumphed--as it will in Israel.
If Ms Amiel believes that today's young war correspondents are getting the story wrong, then there is an easy answer. Instead of shooting the messengers, she should persuade a British newspaper to send her to Israel. (The Daily Telegraph would be a possibility.)
There she could slip on a flack jacket and head off for the action. Then instead of writing critical comment pieces, she could do some on-the-spot war reporting, which I can confirm--as one who has tried it and failed--is dangerous, difficult and seldom appreciated.
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