The journalist Matti Friedman, a veteran of the Associated Press, explains how Hamas has learned how to turn its wars with Israel into bloody public-relations stunts, duly reported by a pliant international press as instances of Israeli perfidy vs. Palestinian innocence. Part of the media’s problem, writes Friedman, stems from the cozy relationship between journalists and “non-governmental organizations”:
In my time in the press corps, I learned that our relationship with these groups was not journalistic. My colleagues and I did not, that is, seek to analyze or criticize them. For many foreign journalists, these were not targets but sources and friends—fellow members, in a sense, of an informal alliance. This alliance consists of activists and international staffers from the UN and the NGOs; the Western diplomatic corps, particularly in East Jerusalem; and foreign reporters. (There is also a local component, consisting of a small number of Israeli human-rights activists who are themselves largely funded by European governments, and Palestinian staffers from the Palestinian Authority, the NGOs, and the UN.) Mingling occurs at places like the lovely Oriental courtyard of the American Colony hotel in eastern Jerusalem, or at parties held at the British Consulate’s rooftop pool. . . .
In these circles, in my experience, a distaste for Israel has come to be something between an acceptable prejudice and a prerequisite for entry. I don’t mean a critical approach to Israeli policies . . . but a belief that to some extent the Jews of Israel are a symbol of the world’s ills, particularly those connected to nationalism, militarism, colonialism, and racism—an idea quickly becoming one of the central elements of the “progressive” Western Zeitgeist, spreading from the European left to American college campuses and intellectuals, including journalists. In this social group, this sentiment is translated into editorial decisions made by individual reporters and editors covering Israel, and this, in turn, gives such thinking the means of mass self-replication.
Read more on Atlantic: http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/11/how-the-media-makes-the-israel-story/383262/?single_page=true