Posted on 04/28/2003 10:59:02 AM PDT by knighthawk
Last Sunday, on a Canadian Broadcasting Corporation radio news broadcast, a reporter from Jerusalem described Hamas as "the Islamic resistance movement" -- and nothing else. In another organization, an editor might have asked the reporter to acknowledge that while some call Hamas a resistance movement, others consider it a band of vicious killers. But at the CBC, this piece of flagrant disinformation went floating out, unchallenged, through the innocent Canadian air.
It was not the result of carelessness. It was acceptable CBC practice, in the style familiar to students of Middle East warfare who follow the CBC. It stands as a perfect symbol of the intellectual corruption that has attacked the CBC from within, and conquered it.
At the CBC, "diversity" has become a sacred word. Management demands diversity in hiring and programming. That means diversity of race, religion and sex; it doesn't mean diversity of opinion, which has become anathema in CBC news. Once the CBC staff was regarded as an unmanageable band of individualists, but lately it has learned to think as a herd.
Reporters, producers and writers speak with a single voice. They view the governments of the United States and Israel with great suspicion, and project their suspicions through the news.
Do they understand what they are doing? Some do, some don't. In many CBC minds anti-U.S. and anti-Israel assumptions are so ingrained that no other view intrudes; intellectually, the journalists run on automatic pilot. If someone raises a complaint over a particularly ugly example of group-think prejudice, that someone is considered a crackpot. CBC journalists can depend on their corporate bosses to deny that bias exists and on the corporate ombudsman to issue a solemn and always highly dignified defence.
A few CBC employees are said to hold opinions outside the culture of consensus, but they have long since been intimidated into silence. I know nothing about internal discussions at the CBC, but I know the results. So far as listeners and viewers can tell, news people approach every item on American or Israeli policy with the same question: How anti-U.S., or anti-Israel, can we afford to be this time? Slightly, quite, very, or extremely?
They communicate their bias against Israel by tone, emphasis, choice of words, and selection of data. They emphasize whatever can be said against Israel and play down anything that might explain its actions.
Israel's aggressive, carefully targeted military policy has reduced wanton suicide murders, but I have never heard that success celebrated or even acknowledged on CBC news. When the CBC mentions public or expert opinion within Israel, it lovingly quotes critics of the government (often unnamed) and leaves the impression that Ariel Sharon lacks popular approval, a position unsupported by polls or election results.
The item last Sunday morning, just 256 words long, demonstrated standard anti-Israel techniques. It led off with casualties that resulted from Israeli military action rather than the reason for the action, gave the reasons briefly and sceptically, mentioned the "resistance movement," cast doubt on Israel's motives, and provided words of support for the Palestinians, whose militia "mounted a fierce defence."
The announcer began: "Five Palestinians and one Israeli soldier were killed overnight during a large-scale military operation in the Rafa refugee camp ... The dead include a fifteen-year-old Palestinian boy." Then Barbara Plett, the reporter in Jerusalem, explained that Rafa, a town on the border with Egypt, is perhaps a violent front line in the "occupied territories," a term that itself is loaded with opinion. She reported that the army "said" it entered the camp searching for tunnels used to smuggle weapons from Egypt, blew up two of them and destroyed the house of a Hamas leader. (She didn't mention that the bigger tunnel's opening was under a Hamas leader's home.)
She described another incursion on the same day in a West Bank town, where the army "said" it was searching for "alleged suicide bombers."
The "alleged" is a nice touch here. She's confident about the fierceness of Palestinian defence but considers suicide bombers only "alleged."
And then she delivered, unanswered and unmodified, a series of brutal and libellous attacks on Israel's motives. Israel "continues such operations despite moves towards an internationally backed peace plan known as the roadmap. Some Israeli analysts say the army is trying to capture as many militants as possible before it's told to ease off. Many Palestinians believe the relentless incursions are designed to draw a militant response and so bury the roadmap because it requires a Palestinian ceasefire. It also calls on Israelis to pull out of Palestinian areas and end offensive operations like the one in Rafa last night." That was it: heavily slanted facts and a conclusion filled with unanswered opinion, all packed into a brief news item.
The principles of journalists come through with the greatest clarity not in spectacular stories about exceptional events but in routine work. The little item from Jerusalem was unambitious and ordinary, no doubt forgotten a few hours later by the people put it on the air. But in a few words it said far more about the CBC than about Israel or Hamas.
robert.fulford@utoronto.ca
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