Journalism v. Propaganda
|
July 21, 2012
|
|
|
|
2012-07-20
Glenn Greenwald
Almost immediately after a suicide bomber killed five Israeli tourists in Bulgaria on Wednesday, Israeli officials, led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, blamed Iran, an accusation uncritically repeated by most Western media outlets even as Bulgarian investigators warned it would be a “mistake” to assign blame before the attack could be investigated. Now, Israel, along with the U.S., is blaming Hezbollah and, therefore, Iran for the attack. Today’s New York Times article by Nicholas Kulish and Eric Schmitt – headlined “Hezbollah Is Blamed for Attack on Israeli Tourists in Bulgaria” – uncritically treats those accusations as confirmed fact despite no evidence being offered for it:
American officials on Thursday identified the suicide bomber responsible for a deadly attack on Israeli vacationers here as a member of a Hezbollah cell that was operating in Bulgaria and looking for such targets, corroborating Israel’s assertions and making the bombing a new source of tension with Iran.
One senior American official said the current American intelligence assessment was that the bomber, who struck Wednesday, killing five Israelis, had been “acting under broad guidance” to hit Israeli targets when opportunities presented themselves, and that the guidance had been given to Hezbollah, a Lebanese militant group, by Iran, its primary sponsor. Two other American officials confirmed that Hezbollah was behind the bombing, but declined to provide additional details.
The attacks, the official said, were in retaliation for the assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists, for which Iran has blamed Israeli agents — an accusation that Israel has neither confirmed nor denied. “This was tit for tat,” said the American official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the investigation was still under way. . . .
A senior Israeli official said on Thursday that the Burgas attack was part of an intensive wave of terrorist attacks around the world carried out by two different organizations, the Iranian Quds Force, an elite international operations unit within Iran’s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, as well as by Hezbollah.
By “identified,” “confirmed” and “corroborated” Iranian and Hezbollah responsibility, what The New York Times means is this: American officials asserted that this was so, even as they “declined to provide additional details” and even though “the investigation was still under way.” Indeed, this accusation is, as the NYT sees it, ”confirmed” and “corroborated” even though “no details yet about the bomber like his name or nationality” are known; even though their anonymous American source “declined to describe what specific intelligence — intercepted communications, analysis of the bomber’s body parts or other details — []led analysts to conclude that the bomber belonged to Hezbollah”; even though “the Bulgarians are still trying to figure out how the bomber entered the country, how he traveled around and where he stayed”; and even though the Bulgarian Foreign Minister said: “We’re not pointing the finger in any direction until we know what happened and complete our investigation.” All The Paper of Record knows is that U.S. and Israeli officials have blamed Iran and Hezbollah, and — as usual — that’s good enough for them. Identified, Confirmed and Corroborated.
By stark contrast, The Washington Post‘s Karin Brulliard, reporting from Jerusalem, commits an act of actual journalism with her story on this event. She, too, notes the official accusations of Hezbollah and Iranian responsibility, but, as Think Progress’ Ali Gharib points out, she heavily qualifies that in the third paragraph of her story: “Israel offered no concrete evidence tying the bombing to Iran, and Bulgarian officials cautioned that it was too early to attribute responsibility.” That’s called basic journalism: instead of just repeating official claims, treating them as “confirmed,” and shaping the entire article around those assertions, she prominently notes that there is no real evidence to lead anyone to believe these accusations. She then adds more skepticism: “U.S. intelligence officials said it was ‘plausible’ that Hezbollah carried out the attack but that analysts at the CIA and other agencies were still evaluating the intelligence surrounding the bombing and had not reached a conclusion…….
…article is continued on salon.com
Tags: nicholas, officials, hezbollah, militant, minister, article, result, assassinations, official
Related posts
Depositors Beware: Theft is Legal for Big Banks, and Your Money Will Never Be Safe
By Ellen Brown “With Cyprus . . . the game itself changed. By raiding the depositors’ accounts, a major central bank has gone where they would not previously have dared. The Rubicon has been crossed.” —Eric Sprott, Shree Kargutkar, “Caveat Depositor 3” The crossing of the Rubicon into the confiscation of depositor funds was not a one-off emergency measure limited to…
Be the first to comment on this story
Science is being corrupted to a point of fraud
By Gary Novak Irrationality in science is every bit as extreme as we see in media events, perhaps more so because of the increased demands in science. Very little science is visible to the public. The carbon dioxide issue is an example of science which has come to the surface of public concerns, and it shows a lack of objectivity…
McDonald’s hamburger from 1999 looks exactly the same today
by Jonathan Benson A Utah man’s recent discovery of an old fast food hamburger hiding in a coat pocket serves as a reminder to us all about why we continue to choose fresh foods as close to their natural states as possible over processed foods. What began as a month-long experiment to see how long it takes for a basic…
Gun Grabbing Senators Look To Resurrect Gun Control
by Tim Brown Socialist gun grabbers were dealt a tremendous blow just a couple of weeks ago, in part due to pressure by American patriots letting Washington elected officials know that they would not go quietly into the night towards tyranny. There were also principled men who stood their ground on the Second Amendment, resulting in all of Barack Obama’s…
Homeland Security under investigation for massive ammo buys
The Department of Homeland Security is under investigation for purchasing large stockpiles of ammunition, days before legislation was introduced that would restrict the amount a government agency can legally buy. The Government Accountability Office is now conducting the investigation into the alleged DHS purchases, which is “just getting underway,” GAO spokesman Chuck Young told US News & World Report. DHS…
Liberty Was Also Attacked in Boston
by Ron Paul Forced lockdown of a city. Militarized police riding tanks in the streets. Door-to-door armed searches without warrant. Families thrown out of their homes at gunpoint to be searched without probable cause. Businesses forced to close. Transport shut down. These were not the scenes from a military coup in a far off banana republic, but rather the scenes…
Boston Marathon Bombing And Every Day Terror in America
By Margaret Kimberley Every year, 4,600 Americans are killed in work place related accidents. Every 28 hours a black person is killed by police, corrections officers, security guards or vigilantes. Every year more than 30,000 people are killed by gun violence in this country. The odds of being killed by a terrorist are only 1 in 20 million. These statistics are rarely…
Boston Bombings: Detonator to Mobilize the Entire US Security Apparatus. May Change the World for the Worse!
By Prof. James Petras The relation between the suspected Boston Marathon bombers and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), the Massachusetts State Police (MSP) and the Boston Police (BP) is a point of contention and controversy. The FBI, at first, claimed no knowledge of the bombing suspects but later was forced to admit having received at least two sets of…