Non-Violent Lefties Get Aggressive and Threatening

As blogged, there was a complaint made against the TV coverage by Channel Two News of a left-wing demo in Silwan some weeks ago, the claim being that Channel Two TV news "railroaded" a non-violent protest movement by using archival footage of stonethrowing:

...they used B Roll from the archive. Fair enough. They could have used, for example, their own footage from previous protests and marked it as archival.

Not only was the B Roll not labelled. It was highly unrepresentative of the event — prayers at an open-air mosque, followed immediately by children throwing stones at Police jeeps. End result: For the the lay viewer, the protest is associated with violence (preceded by Islamic religious incitement, no less).

Was this done with intentionally?

...the Israeli mainstream media tends to serve as dutiful stenographers of government information, especially on security and foreign policy issues.

It’s doubtful if anyone was briefing in this instance, however. My hunch is that someone at Channel Two was pandering to his audience’s sensibilities (or to his own), consciously or subconsciously averting cognitive dissonance...The demonstration at Silwan, like the dozens in Sheikh Jarrah that preceded it, was organized with nearly no outlay using Facebook and other social media.

Facebook also enabled many supporters who could not be present to support the demonstrators. Not only through the sharing of reports and images. On Saturday afternoon, one of the organizers — Daniel Dukarevich — sent out a note (Hebrew) describing what Channel Two had done and asking readers to e-mail the relevant ombudsmen with complaints. Twenty-four hours later, he reported that the Israel Press Council had received the largest number of complaints over a single incident ever and that Channel Two News had contacted him: They had gotten the message and really needed to unclog their inbox.

Well, Golan Yochpaz, the editor of Ulpan Shishi, is complaining that he's being threatened by left-wingers - the non-violent type? And that he is the object of aggressive behavior by these non-violent lefties.

He also is insistent that the violent-appearing footage was indeed from the demonstration at the center of argument. He wrote a letter (here in the Hebrew) that Police Spokesperson Shmulik Ben-Ruby confirmed there was stone-throwing that day.


- - -