Wednesday, January 7, 2009

Israel Puts Media Clamp on Gaza

Israel Puts Media Clamp on Gaza

By Ethan Bronner
The New York Times
January 6, 2009

Jerusalem - Three times in recent days, a small group of foreign
correspondents was told to appear at the border crossing to Gaza. The
reporters were to be permitted in to cover firsthand the Israeli war on
Hamas in keeping with a Supreme Court ruling against the two-month-old
Israeli ban on foreign journalists entering Gaza.

Each time, they were turned back on security grounds, even as relief workers
and other foreign citizens were permitted to cross the border. On Tuesday
the reporters were told to not even bother going to the border.

And so for an 11th day of Israel's war in Gaza, the several hundred
journalists here to cover it waited in clusters away from direct contact
with any fighting or Palestinian suffering, but with full access to Israeli
political and military commentators eager to show them around southern
Israel, where Hamas rockets have been terrorizing civilians. A slew of
private groups financed mostly by Americans are helping guide the press
around Israel.

Like all wars, this one is partly about public relations. But unlike any war
in Israel's history, in this one the government is seeking to entirely
control the message and narrative for reasons both of politics and military
strategy.

"This is the result of what happened in the 2006 Lebanon war against
Hezbollah," said Nachman Shai, a former army spokesman who is writing a
doctoral dissertation on Israel's public diplomacy. "Then, the media were
everywhere. Their cameras and tapes picked up discussions between
commanders. People talked on live television. It helped the enemy and
confused and destabilized the home front. Today, Israel is trying to control
the information much more closely."

The government-commissioned investigation into the war with Hezbollah
reported that the army had found that when reporters were allowed on the
battlefield in Lebanon, they got in the way of military operations by posing
risks and asking questions.

Maj. Avital Leibovich, an army spokeswoman, said, "If a journalist gets
injured or killed, then it is Central Command's responsibility." She said
the government was trying to protect Israel from rocket fire and "not deal
with the media."

Beyond such tactical considerations, there is a political one. Daniel
Seaman, director of Israel's Government Press Office, said, "Any journalist
who enters Gaza becomes a fig leaf and front for the Hamas terror
organization, and I see no reason why we should help that."

Foreign reporters deny that their work in Gaza has been subject to Hamas
censorship or control. Unable to send foreign reporters into Gaza, the
international news media have relied on Palestinian journalists based there
for coverage.

But it seems that many Israelis accept Mr. Seaman's assessment and shed no
tears over the restrictions, despite repeated protests by the Foreign Press
Association of Israel, including on Tuesday.

A headline in Tuesday's issue of Yediot Aharonot, the country's largest
selling daily newspaper, expressed well the popular view of the issue. Over
a news article describing the generally negative coverage so far, especially
in the European media, an intentional misspelling of a Hebrew word turned
the headline "World Media" into "World Liars."

This attitude has been helped by supportive Israeli news media whose
articles have been filled with "feelings of self-righteousness and a sense
of catharsis following what was felt to be undue restraint in the face
attacks by the enemy," according to a study of the first days of media
coverage of the war by a liberal but nonpartisan group called Keshev, the
Center for the Protection of Democracy in Israel.

The Foreign Press Association has been fighting for weeks to get its members
into Gaza, first appealing to senior government officials and ultimately
taking its case to the country's highest court. Last week the justices
worked out an arrangement with the organization whereby small groups would
be permitted into Gaza when it was deemed safe enough for the crossings to
be opened for other reasons.

So far, every time the border has been opened, journalists have not been
permitted to go in.

On Tuesday, the press association released a statement saying, "The
unprecedented denial of access to Gaza for the world's media amounts to a
severe violation of press freedom and puts the state of Israel in the
company of a handful of regimes around the world which regularly keep
journalists from doing their jobs."

At the same time that reporters have been given less access to Gaza, the
government has created a new structure for shaping its public message,
ensuring that spokesmen of the major government branches meet daily to make
sure all are singing from the same sheet.

"We are trying to coordinate everything that has to do with the image and
content of what we are doing and to make sure that whoever goes on the air,
whether a minister or professor or ex-ambassador, knows what he is saying,"
said Aviv Shir-On, deputy director general for media in the Foreign
Ministry. "We have talking points and we try to disseminate our ideas and
message."

Israelis say the war is being reduced on television screens around the world
to a simplistic story: an American-backed country with awesome military
machine fighting a third-world guerrilla force leading to a handful of
Israelis dead versus 600 Gazans dead.

Israelis and their supporters think that such quick descriptions fail to
explain the vital context of what has been happening - years of terrorist
rocket fire on civilians have gone largely unanswered, and a message had to
be sent to Israel's enemies that this would go on no longer, they say. The
issue of proportionality, they add, is a false construct because comparing
death tolls offers no help in measuring justice and legitimacy.

There are other ways to construe the context of this conflict, of course.
But no matter what, Israel's diplomats know that if journalists are given a
choice between covering death and covering context, death wins. So in a war
that they consider necessary but poorly understood, they have decided to
keep the news media far away from the death.

John Ging, an Irishman who directs operations in Gaza for the United Nations
Relief and Works Agency, entered Gaza on Monday as journalists were kept
out. He told Palestinian reporters in Gaza that the policy was a problem.

"For the truth to get out, journalists have to get in," he said.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/01/07/world/middleeast/07media.html?_r=1&ref=bus
iness

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