which entirely changed the tone of the article, as Coastie points out. In a post following his, I pointed this out and complained about it, and used it as an example of why I, at least, feel this news source is NOT objective when dealing with Jewish affairs whether domestic or Israeli.
The Jewish groups all cite Bolton's forceful role in the successful 1991 U.S.-led effort to repeal a 16-year-old United Nations resolution equating Zionism with racism. The Jewish organizations also emphasize that Bolton will be able to reform the UN.
<snip> -- paragraph deleted from original
(comments attributed to Prof. Michael Scharf, director of the Frederick K. Cox International Law Center at Case Western Reserve University, an expert in international criminal law, who worked with Bolton in the State Department from 1991-93.)
While Scharf praises Bolton's achievement in repealing the UN resolution equating Zionism with racism, he feels Bolton would not make a good UN ambassador.
Revoking the UN Zionism resolution, which Scharf says he and Bolton worked on for an entire year, "changed the whole environment at the UN for the Mideast peace process. While that resolution was on the books, it was all about bashing Israel."
<snip> paragraph deleted from original
Bolton does not believe "international law is real law," says Scharf. "He thinks it's all political commitments that can be broken at will."
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http://www.clevelandjewishnews.com/articles/2005/05/13/... http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=show_mesg&forum=124&topic_id=91625&mesg_id=91822&page=***
There's another in the thread about the closing of the 2 vote offices in Jerusalem. It's linked. If you compare it to the original from Reuters you'll see what I mean.
Israel closes Palestinian vote offices in Jerusalem
5/10/2005 7:03:00 PM GMT
Israeli police attacked and shut down two Palestinian vote offices in Arab East Jerusalem that were registering voters for a July parliamentary ballot, claiming that they are operating illegally.
http://www.aljazeera.com/me.asp?service_ID=8196 The way the piece was worded - they used the same headline as the original but changed key words here and there, for example they dropped in the word "attacked", making it sound like a violent episode. The whole tone of the piece was thus subtly but unmistakably changed, and had a definite slant which was NOT apparent in the original.
And, other reports of Israeli misdeeds were added to the article, so the overall impact was very different from the original piece, and far beyond its scope. It gives the feeling, with those reinforcing paragraphs of OTHER incidents, "oh those horrible Israelis" - which the Reuters piece does NOT. If the readership ALREADY is thinking, oh those horrible Israelis, it certainly would reinforce a pre-existing mindset.
***
Similarly the piece about the Jews recommending Bolton left out the RATIONALE behind their having done so, which is because he dealt with the UN on the conflation of Zionism with rascism, and is seen as someone who can reform the UN, as well mentioning as dissenting opinions from within the Jewish community.
Does this make sense? Leaving those paragraphs out of the article made it sound as if AIPAC loves this horrible rightwing cowboy for no particularly good reason. The reader might then conclude, whoa, those horrible Jews, they all love Bolton, that figures. Etc.
As to the tsunami incident, the actual ARTICLES didn't claim the Israelis caused it - although there were other services that DID claim that - and I understand the non-English versions did also - but the headlines most certainly inferred that they did.
In one piece I saw, they dropped in a question mark at the end, so it looked like a question, but the subliminal message was unmistakable. It read something, "Tsunami Man Made?", then sort of dropped the, "some people say that it was caused..." into the article. The article then concluded there was no evidence that people DID cause the tsunami - but the damage was done by that point. The very fact that the question was ASKED is rather astonishing.
Here's another example of a headline having a subliminal impact on the reader:
The U.S. knew about the tsunami
http://www.aljazeera.com/cgi-bin/news_service/middle_east_full_story.asp?service_id=6430Now, the ARTICLE modified the headline but I think the impact got through loud and clear.
These changes or innaccuracies or additions of charged words such as "attacked" don't have to be particularly striking in and of themselves, but they add up to editorializing and thus go beyond the reportage of news. Certainly the use of banner headlines is an age-old attention getter that simultaneously influences the reader's thought processes.
I grew up in and have worked in the advertising business so I'm hypersensitive to these things.
Perhaps you'd need to see the original pieces, like the Reuters piece in the one case and the Cleveland Jewish News piece in the other, to really pick up on it, and see how much these little nips and tucks affect the feeling of the articles.
We accuse Fox of this kind of thing all the time, and think it is bad.
Certainly, for a reader unfamiliar with the complexities of the Israeli/Palestinian situation, or one who is predisposed toward antisemitism or anti-Zionism, al-Jazeera is a paper guaranteed to slant or reinforce his impressions.
I must add, al-Jazeera is mild compared to many.