AP Erases Video of Israeli Soldier Shooting Palestinian Boy

[zynner]

In the midst of journalism's "Sunshine Week"--during which the Associated Press and other news organizations are valiantly proclaiming the public's "right to know"--AP insists on conducting its own activities in the dark, and refuses to answer even the simplest questions about its system of international news reporting. Most of all, it refuses to explain why it erased footage of an Israeli soldier intentionally shooting a Palestinian boy. AP, according to its website, is the world's oldest and largest news organization. It is the behemoth of news reporting, providing what its editors determine is the news to a billion people each day. Through its feeds to thousands of newspapers, radio and television stations, AP is a major determinant in what Americans read, hear and see--and what they don't. What they don't is profoundly important. I investigated one such omission when I was in the Palestinian Territories last year working on a documentary with my colleague (and daughter), who was filming our interviews. On Oct. 17, 2004 Israeli military forces invaded Balata, a dense, poverty-stricken community deep in Palestine's West Bank (Israel frequently invades this area and others). According to witnesses, the vehicles stayed for about twenty minutes, the military asserting its power over the Palestinian population. The witnesses state that there was no Palestinian resistance--no "clash," no "crossfire," not even any stone-throwing. At one point, after most of the vehicles had finally driven away, an Israeli soldier stuck his gun out of his armored vehicle, aimed at a pre-pubescent boy nearby, and pulled the trigger. We went to the hospital and interviewed the boy, Ahmad, his doctors, family, and others. Ahmad had bandages around his lower abdomen, where surgeons had operated on his bladder. He said he was afraid of Israeli soldiers, and pulled up his pants leg to show where he had been shot previously. In the hospital there was a second boy, this one with a shattered femur; and a third boy, this one in critical condition with a bullet hole in his lung. A fourth boy, not a patient, was visiting a friend. He showed us a scarred lip and missing teeth from when Israeli soldiers had shot him in the mouth. This was not an unusual situation. When I had visited Palestinian hospitals on a previous trip, I had seen many such victims; some with worse injuries. Yet, very few Americans know this is going on. AP's actions in regard to Ahmad's shooting may explain why. We discovered that an AP cameraman had filmed the entire incident. This cameraman had then followed what apparently is the usual routine. He sent his video--an extremely valuable commodity, since it contained documentary evidence of a war crime--to the AP control bureau for the region. This bureau is in Israel. What happened next is unfathomable. Did AP broadcast it? No. Did AP place the video in safe-keeping, available for an investigation of this crime? No. According to its cameraman, AP erased it. We were astounded. We traveled to AP's control bureau in Israel. With our own video camera out and running, we asked bureau chief Steve Gutkin about this incident. Was the information we had been told correct, or did he have a different version? Did the bureau have the video, or had they indeed erased it. If so, why? Gutkin, repeatedly looking at the camera and visibly flustered, told us that AP did not allow its journalists to give interviews. He told us that all questions must go to Corporate Communications, located in New York. He explained that they were on deadline and couldn't talk. I said I understood deadline pressure, and sat down to wait until they were done. When he called Israeli police to arrest us, we left. Back in the US later, I phoned Corporate Communications and reached Director of Media Relations Jack Stokes, AP's public relations spokesman. I had conversed with Stokes before. Over the past several years I have noticed disturbing flaws in AP coverage of Israel-Palestine: 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. I would phone AP with the appropriate correction or news alert. One time this resulted in a flawed news story being slightly corrected in updates. In a few cases stories were then covered that had been neglected. In many cases, however, I was told that I needed to speak to Corporate Communications. I would phone Corporate Communications, leave a message, and wait for a response. Most often, none came. Several times, however, I was able to have long conversations with AP spokesman Stokes. None of these conversations, however, ever ended with AP taking any action. Some typical responses: * The omitted story was "not newsworthy." * The story deemed by AP editors to be newsworthy to the rest of the world--e.g. Israel's brutal imprisonment of over 300 Palestinian youths--was not newsworthy in the US (Israel's major ally). * Burying a report of Israeli forces shooting a four-year-old Palestinian girl in the mouth was justified. * Misreporting an incident in which an Israeli officer riddled a 13-year-old girl at close range with bullets was unimportant. Despite this unresponsive pattern, when I learned firsthand of an AP bureau erasing footage of an atrocity, I again phoned Corporate Communications. I no longer had much expectation that AP would take any corrective action, but I did expect to receive some information. I gave spokesperson Stokes the numerous details about this incident that we had gathered on the scene and asked him the same questions I had asked Gutkin. He said he would look into this and get back to me. After several days he had not gotten back to me, so I again phoned him. He said that he had looked into this incident, and that AP had determined that this was "an internal matter" and that they would give no response. While I should have known better, I was again astounded. AP was blatantly violating fundamental journalistic norms of ethical behavior, and clearly felt it had the power to get away with it. Journalism, according to the Statement of Principles of the American Society of Newspaper Editors, is a "sacred trust." It is the bulwark of a free society and is so essential to the functioning of a democracy that our forefathers affirmed its primacy in the very first amendment of the Bill of Rights. Finally, this week, on deadline with a chapter about media coverage of Israel-Palestine, I again tried to confirm some of my facts with AP. Certainly, I felt, during "Sunshine Week" AP would respond. As part of the Sunshine campaign, AP's CEO and President Tom Curley is traveling the country giving speeches on the necessity of transparency and accountability (for government) and emphasizing "the openness that effective democracy requires." "The trend toward secrecy," AP's president has correctly been pointing out, "is the greatest threat to democracy." I emailed my questions to AP, talked to Stokes by phone, and again was told he would get back to me. Again, I got back to him. Then, in a surreal exchange, he conveyed AP's reply: "The official response is we decline to respond." As I asked question after question, many as simple as a confirmation of the number of bureaus AP has in Israel-Palestine, the response was silence or a repetition of: "The official response is we decline to respond." The next day I tried phoning AP's President Curley directly. I was unable to reach Curley, since he was on the road giving his Sunshine Week speeches ("Secrecy," Curley says, "is for losers"), but I left a message for him with an assistant. She said someone would respond. I am still waiting. It is clearly time to go to AP's superiors. The fact is, AP is a cooperative. It is not owned by Corporate Communications spokespeople or by its CEO or even by its board of directors. It is owned by the thousands of newspapers and broadcast stations around the United States that use AP reports. These newspapers, radio and television stations are the true directors of AP, and bear the responsibility for its coverage. In the end, it appears, the only way that Americans will receive full, unbiased reporting from AP on Israel-Palestine will be when these member-owners demand such coverage from their employees in the Middle East and in New York. As long as AP's owners remain too busy or too negligent to ensure the quality and accuracy of their Israel-Palestine coverage, the handful of people within AP who are distorting its news reporting on this tragic, life-and-death, globally destabilizing issue will quite likely continue to do so. In the final analysis, therefore, it is up to us--members of the public--to step in. Everyone who believes that Americans have the right and the need to receive full, undistorted information on all issues, including Israel-Palestine, must take action. We must require our news media to fulfill their profoundly important obligation, and we must ourselves distribute the critical information our media are leaving out. If we don't take action, no one else will.

http://www.counterpunch.org/weir03182006.html

"AP is a major determinant in what Americans read, hear and see--and what they don't."

Something few people discuss, or probably are aware of.

If this story is true, what would happen if the American public knew of Israeli war crimes?

It should be noted that the Associated Press is owned by member newspapers and broadcast companies. And for the conspiracy buffs, many Jewish people run many of those organizations.

Just food for thought...

~ zynner

[belverron]

Quote by: zynner And for the conspiracy buffs, many Jewish people run many of those organizations.

I think this takes in more than the "conspiracy buffs."

[PatrickHenry]

Racist murder doesn't rate a news story but there's no such thing as a New World Order?

Heh. :eek:

[Osborn F Enready]

"conspiracy buffs" are the only ones who look at the system as being as flawed as it is, and the reason they are labeled "conspiracy buffs" is to discredit them in the eyes of the public.

After all, add together the littany of transgressions over the last 6 years ALONE, and you will see that it is as impossible for these things to happen "coincidentally" as it is to win the lottery every single time you play, every year of your life.

This is indeed a conspiracy....... but how many people have the TIME and DESIRE to see what IS really happening?

“The object of opening the mind, as of opening the mouth, is to shut it again on something solid.”
-G.K. Chesterton

“People only see what they are prepared to see.”
-Ralph Waldo Emerson

“Our job is to give people not what they want, but what we decide they ought to have.”
-Richard Salant, former President of CBS News

“If a nation expects to be ignorant and free, in a state of civilization, it expects what never was and never will be.”
-Thomas Jefferson

“Reason obeys itself; and ignorance does whatever is dictated to it.”
-Thomas Paine, Rights of Man ("Conclusion")

“I asked Seymour Hersh at one point offhandedly while we were researching the film, ya know, why is it that this kind of information, the darkest stuff in here, you would think - people like scandal, newspapers like scandal - how come this isn't, like, front page news, all of this? Why are we having to put this in a documentary that, ya know - that people will see, but it's not like front page mainstream coverage.
And he said, well, because every reporter ultimately answers to the fact that he's got to get the scoop, he's gotta be the person who gets the inside scoop. And the way you get the inside scoop, you find an insider in the administration or in the Pentagon or in the Department of State. And you get, ya know, early warnings about certain policy decisions or things coming up. If you go ahead and you write a story that Colin Powell doesn't like or that Donald Rumsfeld doesn't like, you're probably not gonna get the inside scoop the next time.
When he told me this I suddenly understood why the cart really leads the horse in a lot of this, and why unfortunately the pursuit of truth is not first and foremost in journalism and why it's unfortunately corrupted by this relationship of being reliant on insiders for that kind of information.
And that's a very tricky business, and really a threat to the role of the media in an open society.”
-Eugene Jarecki, director of the film The Trials of Henry Kissinger (Jigsaw Educational Productions 2002), in the DVD companion audio commentary of the film. Seymour M. Hersh is a renowned American investigative journalist, who launched his career with the first published account of the My Lai 4 (Son My) massacre in Viet Nam.

“It is also important for the State to inculcate in its subjects an aversion to any "conspiracy theory of history;" for a search for "conspiracies" means a search for motives and an attribution of responsibility for historical misdeeds. If, however, any tyranny imposed by the State, or venality, or aggressive war, was caused not by the State rulers but by mysterious and arcane "social forces," or by the imperfect state of the world or, if in some way, everyone was responsible ("We Are All Murderers," proclaims one slogan), then there is no point to the people becoming indignant or rising up against such misdeeds. Furthermore, an attack on "conspiracy theories" means that the subjects will become more gullible in believing the "general welfare" reasons that are always put forth by the State for engaging in any of its despotic actions. A "conspiracy theory" can unsettle the system by causing the public to doubt the State's ideological propaganda.”
-Murray N. Rothbard, in The Anatomy of the State

“If two or more persons conspire to injure, oppress, threaten, or intimidate any person in any State, Territory, Commonwealth, Possession, or District in the free exercise or enjoyment of any right or privilege secured to him by the Constitution or laws of the United States, or because of his having so exercised the same [...] They shall be fined under this title or imprisoned not more than ten years, or both; and if death results from the acts committed in violation of this section [...] they shall be fined under this title or imprisoned for any term of years or for life, or both, or may be sentenced to death.”
-The US Code, Title 18, §241, "Conspiracy against rights"


It is time to call court into session, and start holding these people accountable.

[Milton Bradley]

Scary shit, man.


Coupled with the fact that this war has seen more reportes killed than any other conflict in US history, I would say there is some cause for concern about the reliability of the "facts" coming out of the Middle East.


This is just the type of thing to make me consider giving Al Jezeera more credibility.


Being squarely inside the Western media umbrella, it makes one wonder. I mean, first AP is neutering the story, then CNN decides if they want to edit, or even show the story...


How many revisions are there in the news we are getting?

[Ghumanto]

Why bother ?

These are Palestinians i.e. Muslims i.e. terrorists . Let them them be killed by the Israelis ! The Israelis are target practicing for Olympics shooting event!
Isn't Israel a democratic country and the people are non Muslims i.e. free society ? So, they are free to do anyhting .

The West has erased the homeland , freedom and all the rights of Palestinian people . So now erasing a report / video footage is not a matter of importance at all !

[Ghumanto]

Whenever there is a topic on Israeli brutalities - the topic is not debated properly.
May I ask why?
Is this Anti Semitic to discuss Israeli brutalities ?

[Matt W]

Quote by: rdnor I guess it is alright for LIBERAL news outlets to tell half of the story when it might make america look good . RIGHT ? You can't have you cake and eat it too ! Libs are all the same ! Your double standards have existed too long and THAT is why you are all in an uproar ! Aaaaahahahahahaha !

Rdnor, debate the topic seriously or don't contribute to the topic. Rants don't mean anything here.

Do not respond to me within this thread. PM myself or Sean with any questions.