Friday, March 07, 2008

Looking at how some newspapers reported about yeterday's massacre

Again, on the same Israeli forum, someone published a bunch of scans from leading newspapers, some Israeli, most American.

Another link - down the thread to more scans. The Sau Paulo Brazilian paper outdid themselves and showed the right pictures for a change, as well as appropriate usage of vocabulary: Terror.

You could say I'm too easily offended... I noticed something interesting. While many did give this heinous barbarism a front page spot, some did not mention that Arabs did it. Not Palestinians, no mention of Hezbollah, no mention of the parties in the streets of Gaza to celebrate the slaughter.

Many used the word "Gunman" - no identity or ideology is needed. Not Jihadist, Islamist, terrorist, could the gunman be just anyone?! According to the headlines it sure is.

Los Angeles Times - 8 killed. Not murdered nor slaughtered, killed - as if by accident. However the "Palestinian" (not terrorist) was "shot dead".

Here's a completely incomprehensible and detached headline: "Students slain at religious school". Indeed the San Diego Union Tribune did bother to elaborate a bit in the subtitle.

The San Francisco Chronicle did surprise me. They managed to use the non detached, some would say inflammatory word "Massacre". Good for them, if only they would manage to describe the perpetrator's ethnic identity as well.

Here's another question, while on every occasion when there are casualties on the Arab side, the media do their best to show the most horrific - even if staged - scenes. There were quite enough horrific scenes yesterday, and while the Israeli press do not publish them for fear of traumatizing the population (which has seen far too much first hand), the global media choses to hide those images as well. If it is worth a front page story, why not show the images? Why only show bystanders mourning?

I'm not that naive - that question was rhetorical.

BTW - another annoying thing is that most papers chose first mention that there is a risk to peace talks, before describing the incident. What peace talks? Who gives a crap? The newspapers continue to disburse misinformation creating a mystique cloud of some peace process that doesn't exist. See - the real fear is that peace might not come, not that more Jews would be murdered...

1 comment:

  1. Anonymous3:04 PM

    One of the italian papers "La Stampa" (closer to the end of the thread) writes something like "palestinian terrorist" in the description. Good for them.

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