Apartheid

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than those of Israeli security personnel (84 percent vs. 69 percent), the reverse was true with
Palestinians (20 percent vs. 72 percent).’ 678
The privately owned American media are even more biased in favor of Israel. In a
separate report by FAIR, the use of the terms, ‘retaliation’, ‘retaliate’, ‘retaliatory’, etc. in
nightly news broadcasts from September 28, 2000 through March 17, 2002 by the three main
broadcasting networks, NBC, CBS and ABC, with regard to Israeli and Palestinian violent
acts was analyzed. The findings indicated that 79 per cent of the time the words were used to
describe Israeli acts of violence. Palestinian violent acts, however, were only described with
these words in 9 per cent of the cases. (12 per cent were ambiguous or used to describe violent
acts by both sides in the conflict). The impression was thus fostered that Israel acts in selfdefense,
in response to violence initiated by their foes, almost nine times more than the
Palestinians do. It should by no means be forgotten in this context that in reality both the first
use of firearms, the first five deaths and the first hundreds of gunshot wounds in the Second
Intifada were all perpetrated by Israeli soldiers and policemen, nor that around three quarters
of the killings in the Intifada thus far were in fact of Palestinians by Israelis. Retaliation? 679
The same kind of behavior, amounting to inexcusable, downright lies spread by the US
media, could be observed during Israel’s 18-year occupation of southern Lebanon. In a fit of
wilful manipulation, retaliatory Hezbollah attacks on Israel on June 24, 1999, killing two
civilians, were simply and falsely predated by the US media to give the impression that they
occurred before Israel killed at least nine Lebanese civilians in massive bombing raids earlier
on the same day. Those US media outlets included CNN, Time, Newsweek, NPR, and the
Chicago Tribune, media that all have access to all the major news agencies, including the
American Associated Press, the British Reuters and the Agence France-Presse, which all
recorded the chronology of events accurately. 680
But even the news agencies are not immune. Associated Press (AP), the largest news
organization in the world, apparently erases video material that records Israeli soldiers
committing war crimes. In the words of one critic its coverage of the conflict suffers from the
following kinds of systematic pro-Israeli bias and manipulation: ‘newsworthy stories not
being covered, reports sent to international newspapers but not to American ones, stories
omitting or misreporting significant facts, critical sentences being removed from updated
reports.’ A major study established that in 2004, AP reported 131% of Israeli deaths (some
deaths were reported repeatedly) and 66% of Palestinian deaths in headlines or first
paragraphs. It covered Israeli children’s deaths at a rate 7.5 times greater than that of
Palestinian children’s deaths. 681
678 Fairness & Accuracy in Reporting, Action Alert: For NPR, Violence Is Calm if It’s Violence against
Palestinians, 2002. The title of the article refers to allegations by NPR that Israel and the occupied Palestinian
territories are ‘calm’ unless there is violence perpetrated against Jews. According to FAIR, its action alert
prompted ‘at least several hundred people’ to protest the biased use of ‘calm’ by contacting NPR and
complaining against its flagrant misuse of public funds for pro-Israeli propaganda. Yet in spite of the FAIR
campaign no improvement with regard to this bias in the NPR coverage of the conflict could be detected a month
later. See FAIR: Activism Update: NPR Continues Distortion on Mideast ‘Calm’, 2002. Thus, the pro-Israeli
bias on NPR is not only habitual, it is conscious and arrogant, as well. The same manner of underreporting
Palestinian deaths while making Israeli deaths major news items is also obvious in the privately-owned US
media. See FAIR: Media Advisory: Journalists Find ‘Calm’ when Only Palestinians Die, 2003.
679 FAIR, Action Alert: In U.S. Media, Palestinians Attack, Israel Retaliates, 2002. ABC was the least biased
network with ‘only’ three times as many uses of the words for Israeli acts, whereas NBC was the worst, never
once referring to Palestinian violent acts as retaliation, but 41 times to Israeli violent acts as such. See also FAIR,
Action Alert: CBS’s Mideast ‘Cycle of Violence’; Analysis Omits Palestinian Deaths, 2006. On the nearly
ubiquitous lack of balance and objectivity in the US media, especially in foreign news reporting, and their
systemic roots in an elitist system of economic and political dominance, see Herman & Chomsky 1994 (1988);
Patterson & Wilkins: Media Ethics: Issues and Cases, 5 2005: 196.
680 Ibish: Retaliating in Advance: U.S. Reports Reverse Chronology of Israeli Airstrikes on Lebanon, 1999
681 Quote from Weir: AP Erases Video of Israeli Soldier Shooting Palestinian Boy, 2006; If Americans Knew:
Deadly Distortion: Associated Press Coverage of Israeli and Palestinian Deaths, 2006. See this website also for