By Daniel Pipes
FrontPageMagazine.com
As staff at some of the world’s most prestigious press organizations effectively take Hizbullah’s side in its war with Israel, they inadvertently reveal a profound transformation in the logic of warfare.
Some examples of their actions:
· Reuters: Adnan Hajj, a freelance photographer with over a decade’s experience at Reuters, doctored his pictures to make Israeli attacks on Lebanon look more destructive and Lebanese more vulnerable. His embellishments created thicker and darker plumes of smoke from bombing raids and posed the same woman bewailing the loss of her bombed-out residence in three different locations. Reuters fired Hajj and withdrew 920 of his pictures from its archive. Further research by bloggers uncovered four types of fraudulent pictures by Reuters, all exaggerating Israeli aggressiveness. The bloggers even documented how a Reuters picture was staged.
· The BBC: Editors actively trolled for personal accounts to demonize Israel, posting this request on its news pages: “Do you live in Gaza? Have you been affected by violence in the region? Send us your experiences using the form below. If you are happy to speak to us further please include contact details.”
· CNN: an anchor on its international program, Rosemary Church, implied that Israeli forces could shoot down Hizbullah’s rockets but chose not to do so when she asked an Israeli spokesman, “would Israel not be trying to shoot them out of the sky? They have the capability to do that.”
· The Washington Post: Similarly, military affairs reporter Thomas Ricks announced on national television that unnamed U.S. military analysts believe the Israeli government “purposely has left pockets of Hezbollah rockets in Lebanon, because as long as they're being rocketed, they can continue to have a sort of moral equivalency in their operations in Lebanon.” Having one’s own people injured, he explained, offers “the moral high ground.”
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