Politics

Bias in Middle East Media Reports

Last week Reuters admitted that one of its journalists had altered some images. Days later, Reuters pulled all images of photojournalist Adnan Hajj from its archives.

The problem first surfaced in the blog Little Green Footballs. It is one of many blogs that decry media coverage of the middle east conflict as anti-Israel, and they were quick to use this story as validation of their concerns.

In this post I will not address the issue of whether the media is biased or Israel restrained. Media reporting is done by humans, and it is hard to be objective when people are dying. Besides, criticism of media bias runs both ways (a Google search for “Fox News media bias“, for instance, returns some very good results).

Instead, I discuss how the criticisms of anti-Israel media bias by this group of blogs is misplaced, even disingenous, on two counts.

First, such criticism is based on an ad hominem logical fallacy - or a logical reasoning of personal attack. For the most part, it does not address the reality nor the facts reported, but rather the motives of those reporting it. For instance, the oddly named HonestReporting writes:

A Reuters photo turns out to be an outright lie, manipulated to make damage in Beirut appear much worse than reality.

Yes, the Reuters photo was doctored. But that does not take anything away from the fact that damage to Beirut is significant. See for instance, these satellite images (Yahoo! News) or this report of an oil spill (from a hopefully unbiased National Geographic).

A more recent post on Little Green Footballs refers to an individual - Salam Daher - who helps film a dead child. The blog decries AP’s support for this individual, calling him a ‘film director’, rather than a ‘civil defense worker’ and expressing outrage at his filming of a dead child’s body. Comments on that post mirror that outrage. Yet, all these criticisms ignore two crucial facts of this incident:

1. That Salem Daher may be a ‘civil defense worker’, a ‘film director’, a nurse, a martian, or all of the above.
2. And regardless of who he is, a child is dead.

An ad hominem reasoning generally proceeds as follows:

1. A makes claim X.
2. There is something objectionable about A.
3. Therefore claim X is false.

In this case, LGF casts doubts on those reporting the attack in Qana, forgetting, conveniently perhaps, that Qana did indeed occur. The outrage of LGF and its patrons would be more believable if they had saved some of it for the death of the child, and not all of it for the ‘desecration’ of his body.

Second, these blogs level two further charges against mainstream media, such as Reuters and AP. Based on individual incidents of erroneous reporting, they claim that a) all or nearly all media coverage is biased, and b) that this bias in reporting is deliberate and deceiptful.

It is unclear, however, how one reaches this general conclusion of a broad pattern, from individual cases. Such an inference - and that is what it is - would be reasonable if a large majority of reports were either wrong or misrepresented facts. There is, however, no evidence of that being the case. Quite the contrary, Reuters took swift action and erred on the side of caution to remove all images of the photojournalist mentioned previously.

If one’s trust in news (as opposed to its authenticity) is based on trust in its source - as is often the case - Reuters, AP and others have certainly provided more objective coverage of news for a lot longer than the blogs of yesterday. While this suggestion is certainly not conclusive either, in the absence of hard, undeniable, and overwhelming facts, one can only draw the conclusion of deliberate media misreporting if one is, oneself, either prejudiced or given to believing in conspiracy theories.

There is no doubt that media coverage can, is, and will remain biased. In the specific context of the Middle East conflict, it is entirely possible that some video coverage coming from Lebanon is stage-managed, because Hezbollah is known to be media savvy and has popular support among those reporting the conflict. Then again, is it really surprising if a Lebanese reporter wishes to overstate the damage done to his bleeding country?

Unfortunately for those complaining of media bias, casting suspicion on the reporter is not the same as casting suspicion on the report. Such criticism is logically false. And, when implying deliberate bias, such criticism is itself given to bias, only a different, anti-mainstream media or pro-Israeli kind.

Related Reading:

• In Wars, Quest for Media Balance is also a Battlefield (NYTimes).
• Blogging the Conflict in Lebanon (BBC News).

© 2006 The Discomfort Zone.