Dura-bull

Knowing that the verdict in the Karsenty-Enderlin trial is due today, I looked for some news. But when I googled “Karsenty” I got precisely one result in the news section. It had to do with a talk Phillipe Karsenty gave a few weeks ago.

However when I did a blog search, there were plenty of results.

Israel Matzav explains why the MSM is so uninterested in the verdict:

The bottom line is that the mainstream media outside France is ignoring the case because they know that they are guilty of the same fraud of which France 2 is guilty: They use ‘Palestinian’ stringers rather than their own real reporters in Judea, Samaria and Gaza and in other ‘war zones’ like Iraq.

At the Volokh Conspiracy, Neil Netanel wrote in a similar vein a few weeks ago:

The kind of media manipulation to which the al-Dura incident points is all too common in reporting from the region. Recall the initial Palestinian reports in September 2000 of an Israeli massacre of 3,000 Palestinian civilians in Jenin, broadcast without question by CNN, NPR, the BBC, and others, while the truth turned out to be 52 Palestinians killed, most of whom were armed combatants. (See here and here.) More recently, Hamas has staged and Western media reported electricity shortages in Gaza, replete with candles purporting to provide needed light while, as it turned out, screens blocked sunshine from streaming in through the window.Certainly, some media outlets seem all too eager to transmit reports of Israeli atrocities. But the problem is far broader and deeper than that. Both broadcast and print journalists face tremendous pressure to produce under a highly competitive 24/7 news cycle. At the same time, many news organizations have sharply reduced their staff of foreign correspondents. As a result, they are increasingly reliant on local stringers and camera operators to report on local stories. In areas of conflict, it is inevitable that more than a trivial percentage of local reporters will be partisans and that video footage will be designed or doctored to favor one side or the other.

One hopes that major news organizations are able and willing to weed out the vast majority of questionable reporting, just as CNN refused to broadcast the al-Dura footage. But there are, of course, no guarantees. And, as I emphasized in an ealier post, fact-checking, like quality original reporting, costs a lot of money.

For their part, bloggers do an admirable job of exposing media failures. At the same time, for better or for worse, the Internet serves as an unfiltered outlet for the stories and footage that media organizations deem insufficiently trustworthy to carry.

(BTW, the Jenin libel occurred in April 2002, not Sept 2000.)

It’s not just the general problem of relying on notoriously unreliable (truthwise) stringers, it’s that most of the media was complicit in spreading the al-Dura libel.

The media’s ignoring the Karsenty-Enderlin case shows their lack of accountability for their own actions. They refuses to divorce itself from their “rough draft of history” fantasy; that all they’re doing is acting as stenographers in good faith. But they’re not; they are agenda driven, interested only in advancing causes to which they are sympathetic.

In the al-Dura case the narrative of an Israeli overreaction was too compelling to ignore. They swallowed the story whole, without a second thought. Even now they are too convinced of their on righteousness to have second thoughts nearly eight years later.

The MSM lives on its arrogance. Its declining fortunes is one of the reason for its continued decline.

So why not challenge Clark Hoyt ( public@nytimes.com ) or Deborah Howell ( ombudsman@washpost.com ) to get their papers to cover the trial and take a long overdue look in the mirror?

Crossposted on Soccer Dad.