Media Comment: Iran and Israel’s extreme left-wing media
By YISRAEL MEDAD, ELI POLLAK
Our suggestion: let the news speak for itself. Our media “experts” should stick to reporting the facts. That is the professional, the democratic and the lawful way for them to do their job.
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| Israeli journalists gather a story (Photo: Marc Israel Sellem) |
On Tuesday, during an interview by a sports reporter a politician commented that: “political reporters are a lot like sports reporters. They’ve all got opinions, even if they never played.” That politician was US President Barack Obama, and the interview was broadcast over the Des Moines, Iowa, KXNO sports radio. In Israel, the term we would use would surely be “kibitzing.” But there’s a multi-pronged barb in Obama’s words, which are applicable to our local media and those who run it.
As we understand it, this political contender for office knows well that reporters are not objective. It is only a matter of the degree to which they insert not only wrong information, through sloppy work or otherwise, but a bit of bias, whether through omission or commission. In addition to opinions that sometimes insert themselves into the reporting of news, there is also the lingering concern as to whether reporters are truly knowledgeable about their beats. Are they sufficiently experienced “players” who can take to the field to compete not only with rival journalists but also with the people and events they cover?
This last point is especially relevant to the tom-tom beating that has been going on, at ever-increasing volume, in certain media quarters covering the possibility that Israel’s government may be forced by circumstances to employ military alternatives to curb the nuclear weapons program of Iran.
Iran is the country whose supreme leader, Ali Khamenei, recently announced that Israel will disappear from the “landscape of geography” and that its land will be returned to the Palestinians.
A few days later, on the occasion of Al-Quds Day, he characterized Israel’s administration of the disputed territories and, for good measure, the formation of Israel as the root of evil in the Middle East, which was a “conspiracy [of] colonialists and oppressors.”
