Journalism Wisdom

From one of the most over-rated and self-smug journalists around:

I’ve always thought that the most important rule of journalism is: Never try to be smarter than the story.

Tom Friedman
"Daring to Fail"
New York Times
Ausust 8, 2013

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Jerusalem's First English-Language Newspaper

Jerusalem's first English-language newspaper was not the Palestine Jerusalem Post.

It was The Jerusalem News.

Pages from The New Palestine by William Denison McCrackan:-

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Irresponsible Media - Dead Journalist

A BBC journalist who was murdered on assignment in Somalia was not wearing a flak jacket when she was shot in the back outside a hotel, an inquest heard today.

The senior producer Kate Peyton, 39, had only just arrived in the country's lawless capital, Mogadishu, in February 2005, when she was killed.

She had travelled there from her base in Johannesburg with the reporter Peter Greste to film a series of reports about the Somali peace process.

DCI David Skevington, of Suffolk police, told the inquest at Ipswich crown court today that Peyton was not wearing a flak jacket when a gunman opened fire as she went to get into a car outside the Sahafi hotel.

"The BBC will say that flak jackets were taken but were not normally worn because it was thought that it would draw unnecessary attention and invite attack," he said.

Source

And this

A BBC journalist shot dead while working in one of the world's most dangerous countries "felt she had to go" to prove her commitment, an inquest heard today.

Producer Kate Peyton, 39, of Beyton, Suffolk, died in February 2005 after being shot in the back by a gunman outside a hotel in Mogadishu.

Her sister Rebecca, 36, told the inquest in Ipswich today that Miss Peyton was worried about losing her job.

Rebecca said her sister wanted a fourth year added to her contract and feared that bosses doubted her commitment.

"She had been told there were doubts about her commitment to her job," said Rebecca.

"She completely felt that she had to go to prove that she was committed.

"When it comes to news journalism, you can earn a lot of points by going to dangerous places.

Yonatan Mendel the Journalist

Some excerpts from his "diary":-

It was curious to watch the newspapers’ responses to the assassination of Imad Moughniyeh in Syria two weeks ago. Everyone tried to outdo everyone else over what to call him: arch-terrorist, master terrorist or the greatest terrorist on earth. It took the Israeli press a few days to stop celebrating Moughniyeh’s assassins and start doing what it should have done in the first place: ask questions about the consequences of the killing. The journalist Gideon Levy thinks it is an Israeli trend: ‘The chain of “terrorist chieftains” liquidated by Israel, from Ali Salameh and Abu Jihad through Abbas Musawi and Yihyeh Ayash to Sheikh Ahmed Yassin and Abdel Aziz Rantisi (all “operations” that we celebrated with great pomp and circumstance for one sweet and intoxicating moment), have thus far brought only harsh and painful revenge attacks against Israel and Jews throughout the world.’

Israeli correspondents on Arab affairs must of course speak Arabic – many of them indeed studied it in the security establishment’s schools – and they need to know the history and politics of the Middle East. And they have to be Jews. Strikingly, the Israeli-Jewish media prefer to hire journalists with average Arabic rather than native speakers, since they would be Palestinian citizens of Israel. Apparently, Jewish journalists are better equipped than Arab Israelis to explain ‘what Arabs think’, ‘Arab aims’ or ‘what Arabs say’. Maybe this is because the editors know what their audience wants to hear. Or, even more important, what the Israeli audience would rather not hear.

If the words occupation, apartheid and racism (not to mention Palestinian citizens of Israel, bantustans, ethnic cleansing and Nakba) are absent from Israeli discourse, Israeli citizens can spend their whole lives without knowing what they have been living with...

...And then there are the Occupied Territories themselves. Remarkably, there are no Occupied Territories in Israel. The term is occasionally used by a leftist politician or columnist, but in the hard news section it doesn’t exist. In the past they were called the Administered Territories in order to conceal the actual fact of occupation; they were then called Judea and Samaria; but in Israel’s mass media today they’re called the Territories (Ha-Shtachim). The term helps preserve the notion that the Jews are the victims, the people who act only in self-defence, the moral half of the equation, and the Palestinians are the attackers, the bad guys, the people who fight for no reason. The simplest example explains it: ‘a citizen of the Territories was caught smuggling illegal weapons.’ It might make sense for citizens of an occupied territory to try to resist the occupier, but it doesn’t make sense if they are just from the Territories.

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UPDATE

My friend MosheG wrote me this:-

I really liked the honesty and the truth embodied in this statement of his.
It's a shame he didn't include some pictures of doing operations by candlelight -

"Last month, as a measure against Qassam militants, Israel decided to stop Gaza's electricity for a few hours a day. Despite the fact that this means, for instance, that electricity will fail to reach hospitals, it was said that 'the Israeli government decided to approve this step, as another non-lethal weapon.'"