New Years Rockets

From The Age via (the Guardian):

"Foreign journalists have been forced to report without getting to the detail of what is going on. That meant, at least in the early days of the bombardment, that reporters who would have been in Gaza were instead reporting from Israeli towns and cities under fire from Hamas,"

Clearly foreign journalists have absoloute powers to be able to report from wherever they want, circumstances be damned. I mean it's not like that ever happened in Iraq, or Afghanistan, or Vietnam, or WW2, Russian revolution, American Civil War, etc etc, etc

"An Israeli official told me they were delighted at a BBC TV correspondent broadcasting from Ashkelon in a flak jacket, reinforcing the impression that the Israeli city is a war zone when there is more chance of being hit by a car than a rocket."

Dear Mr Sneery Journo, below is a video about a Hamas rocket strike into Ashkelon. I'm pretty sure you'd be wearing a flak jacket if you were reporting from there, but I doubt very much you have the cojones.

Find more videos like this on www.truveo.com.

"The notable exception is al-Jazeera TV, which has a bureau in Gaza City and has been broadcasting live from there."

Of course, the brave and bold al-Jazeera who were forced to apologise to Israel for disgraceful biased coverage over the release of Samir Kuntar and his merry band of Israeli-killers. Thank the space monkey they are there to provide some much needed objectivity.

"Take the UN school (where 42 people were killed by an Israeli shell) for example. There's a lot of questions as to what actually happened. If the foreign media had been there it would have had much more of an impact on the conflict than it has at the moment."

Indeed. I'm pretty sure the marines at Haditha were ecstatic about the presence of foreign journalists who completely fabricated a story about marines who allegedly revenge killed a family of innocent Iraqis. Did that foreign media coverage (who all are the bastions of objectivity and love GW Bush) help the conflict in any way? Or did it perhaps make the troops job are bit harder? (Did I mention all the marines were cleared ?)

Quoting a bit from Mark Steyn's column:

"In Paris, the state-owned TV network France-2 broadcasts film of dozens of dead Palestinians killed in an Israeli air raid on New Year's Day. The channel subsequently admits that, in fact, the footage is not from Jan. 1, 2009, but from 2005, and, while the corpses are certainly Palestinian, they were killed when a truck loaded with Hamas explosives detonated prematurely while leaving the Jabaliya refugee camp in another of those unfortunate work-related accidents to which Gaza is sadly prone. Conceding that the Palestinians supposedly killed by Israel were, alas, killed by Hamas, France-2 says the footage was broadcast "accidentally.""

Along with the long and glorious history of media objectivity towards Israel, is it a surprise when they're not welcoming to the press? It is perhaps a shame that any foreign press representatives weren't in the school prior to it's destruction, so they could have given the world up to the minute updates and answer all those questions.

Back to the article:

"For the first time, when Israel raised questions, journalists had to address these issues and not get caught in a feeding frenzy of reporting the story."

Well it's about bloody time they got their media handling act together.

"Israel has long accommodated an often critical foreign press corps, generally without interference, although hostility grew after the outbreak of the second intifada because journalists were perceived as pro-Palestinian."

And the answer to that question just a few lines later...

"The BBC has two Palestinian producers in Gaza who have supplied material."

I'm sure they are as neutral as any other employee of the BBC.