Wow... sounds like the Arabs are really working for peace here, and those darned Israelis keep bombing and bombing.
Except:
quote:GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip (AP) - After a final burst of violence, a tenuous ceasefire began to take hold in the Gaza Strip early Tuesday after five days of intense fighting between the rival Hamas and Fatah factions left 34 people dead.
The lull came just as Israel carried out its first response to a Palestinian suicide bombing, carrying out an air strike early Tuesday on a tunnel dug by Palestinians near the Gaza-Israel border. ... Hamas, which controls the Palestinian parliament and cabinet, praised the attack as legitimate resistance, and Israeli leaders hinted that a military response was being considered.
And then they leave this to the second page:
quote:The Israeli military said the tunnel it bombed Tuesday was meant for use by militants for an attack against Israel. No casualties were reported. In the past, militants had dug such tunnels to attack Israeli army outposts and other installations.
What's fascinating is this:
quote:Israel observed a truce with the Palestinians in Gaza since late November, and the air strike appeared to signal that Monday's suicide bombing in Eilat - the first the town had seen - put that ceasefire in danger.
Apparently nothing the Arabs can do, short of sending tanks in across our borders, counts as a violation of a ceasefire. Blowing us up doesn't count. But our destruction of a conduit for illegal arms and sneak attacks does.
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posted
I think the headline is needlessly provocative and pretty blatantly biased. There are other ways to phrase that story (and the headline is, technically, accurate) without conveying that message.
As for the last quote, at first I was tempted to disagree with your interpretation-to think that perhaps the article means that it was the suicide bombing, and not the retaliatory air strike, which endangered the cease-fire. But on further reading, it certainly doesn't seem as though that's what's being said. It says that the signal that the cease-fire was in danger didn't come until the Israelis attacked in response to a suicide bombing.
Shouldn't a suicide bombing on the part of one party in a cease-fire be an obvious endangerment of the cease-fire in and of itself?
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It seems a poorly-headlined article for another reason. While someone who's been paying attention would understand that there is currently a cease-fire between Fatah and Hamas, the headline and its juxtaposition of that and Israeli bombing implies that it's a cease-fire between Israel and Palestinians that's being discussed, when the article is only about 1/3 about that.
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quote: The shaky truce deal, struck by Prime Minister Ismail Haniyeh of Hamas and a Rauhi Fattouh, an envoy of Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas, came as a two-month ceasefire between Israel and the Palestinians was being jeopardized by a Palestinian suicide bombing , the first since April. The bomber, a 21-year-old from Gaza, struck the Israeli resort city of Eilat on the Red Sea on Sunday, killing three people and himself.
quote:Israel observed a truce with the Palestinians in Gaza since late November, and the air strike appeared to signal that Monday's suicide bombing in Eilat - the first the town had seen - put that ceasefire in danger.
Wouldn't the suicide bombing itself be a pretty clear signal, and not response to it, that the ceasefire was endangered?
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posted
Rakeesh, I thinks it's an attempt to not put an unsourced opinion in a news item. One can be of the opinion it would (and I would agree), but there's no proof that it will, unless they can get someone on either side to make the claim.
A poorly written article, but I think what they were trying to do was the opposite of what Lisa assumes. That they failed to communicate that properly, is apparent.
posted
Title could be better. Article seems o.k. to me.
It's interesting to me how people of various ethnic groups, or nationalities, can see bias/media bias for their particular ethnic group wherever they look. The media is apparently anti-Arab, Semitic, Muslim, Christian, Hispanic, Black, White, child, capitalist, socialist, family, divorced family, man, woman, whatever depending on who you talk to. It's the biggest invisible elephant in the world.
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posted
What I find interesting and useful in determining a bias in media is to look at who pays for it.
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posted
I thought the cease-fire in question was referring to Hamas and Fatah, seeing as how they've been beating the hell out of each other lately, and there hasn't been a suicide bombing from them in the last 9 months.
I really don't see how anyone could pin blame on Israel for that one though, they bombed an illegal tunnel that had military applications, posed a threat to citizens, and for that matter, didn't actually cause any casualties when they did it. HAVING the tunnel should count as a threat to a cease fire, not destroying it.
quote: NEW YORK (Reuters) -- The Bush administration will notify Congress Monday that Israel may have violated agreements with Washington when it fired U.S.-supplied cluster munitions into Lebanon in its war with Hezbollah last summer, The New York Times reported in Sunday editions.
Citing State Department officials who spoke Saturday, the Times said the preliminary findings had spawned a sharp debate -- which one official characterized as "head-butting" -- within the administration over whether Washington should penalize its ally for using cluster munitions in towns and villages where Hezbollah guerrillas placed rocket launchers. * Cluster bombs are small explosive devices that are released from a projectile and are dispersed and supposed to explode on hitting the ground. But many remain unexploded. More than 20 people have been killed and 70 wounded by cluster bombs since the end of the war in August. Israel has said it only deploys them in accordance with international law.
I don't think it was in this article, but others have stated that Israel expects to have the unexploded bomblets cleaned up by December of 2008. So only another two years of playing pedestrian Russian Roulette in southern Lebanon.
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quote:Originally posted by Storm Saxon: Title could be better. Article seems o.k. to me.
It's interesting to me how people of various ethnic groups, or nationalities, can see bias/media bias for their particular ethnic group wherever they look. The media is apparently anti-Arab, Semitic, Muslim, Christian, Hispanic, Black, White, child, capitalist, socialist, family, divorced family, man, woman, whatever depending on who you talk to. It's the biggest invisible elephant in the world.
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I agree. I think how you view the bias in media has more to do with your own personal insecurities than not. The most glaring example near-home is how the "persecuted" Christians in the United States view the media as out to get them.
In any case, its funny if you google the author of the stories name.
quote: Here's a partial fix: instead of considering how the article feels, count up relevant references. For example, how many attributions of blame to Israel, and how many to Palestinian groups? How many acts of violence associated with each? How many times were words associated with each made negative, neutral, or positive? (For example, "attack" is negative, "strike" is neutral, and "strike back" is positive.) Was significant relevant information withheld (as when we read about a terror attack, and they conceal the religion that motivated the attack)?
You can easily make the article anti-Palestinian using any of these or all of these. For instance:
quote: GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip (AP) - After a final burst of violence, a tenuous ceasefire began to take hold in the Gaza Strip early Tuesday after five days of intense fighting between the rival Hamas and Fatah factions left 34 people dead.
Article starts off painting Hamas and Fatah as violent, warring, whatever. Lack of context edit: in the paragraph as to why they are fighting.
quote: The lull came just as Israel carried out its first response to a Palestinian suicide bombing, carrying out an air strike early Tuesday on a tunnel dug by Palestinians near the Gaza-Israel border.
Article calls the bombing a 'suicide bombing', which is biased against Palestinians. Frames the response of Israel as justified. Leaves the Palestinian a faceless drone. Doesn't follow up with the damage the strikes caused or give context as to the number of air strikes overall against Palestinians, the number of false airstrikes against Palestinians, the number of Palestinian dead versus the number of Israeli dead, etc.
quote: Previous truce deals between Hamas and Fatah struck in recent weeks of factional clashes have quickly collapsed, and it appeared unlikely the two sides would comply with all the terms of the current agreement, such as handing over all those involved in killings and abductions.
Third paragraph in. Still painting Palestinian groups as 'factional' and having 'clashes'. Points out killings and abductions and doesn't point out any positive aspects of Hamas or Fatah, why they were clashing. In other words, the stage has been set for the Palestinians as brutes and tribal savages.
This continues, by and large, throughout the first page until the second page, when the Israeli response is sympathetically shown by
quote: he Israeli military said the tunnel it bombed Tuesday was meant for use by militants for an attack against Israel. No casualties were reported. In the past, militants had dug such tunnels to attack Israeli army outposts and other installations.
Israel observed a truce with the Palestinians in Gaza since late November, and the air strike appeared to signal that Monday's suicide bombing in Eilat - the first the town had seen - put that ceasefire in danger.
Defence Minister Amir Peretz visited the scene of the suicide bombing in Eilat on Tuesday, promising to step up patrols along Israel's southern border to prevent similar infiltrations.
"We will protect the citizens of Israel and we will protect the tourism centres of Israel," he said. "We will check all the means at our disposal in order to deal with the travel routes and also with the existing threats and also the infrastructure."
Read "Covering Islam" by Edward Said some time for more examples of how one person thinks the media is anti-Muslim and/or Arab.
Please note that I'm not saying that there aren't articles or people in the media that aren't bias, nor am I trying to contradict what Lisa has written, exactly. I'm just saying that bias is very difficult to really pin down. Depending on where you are coming from, and with what facts, it is often easier to see bias in one direction than another.
quote: I must have missed the anti-child media! The anti-family media too. Anti-woman media? I'd guess none of these are AP!
There are people on both sides of the ideological spectrum who say that the media is anti all of those categories. There've been examples of them on this forum.
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quote:I agree. I think how you view the bias in media has more to do with your own personal insecurities than not. The most glaring example near-home is how the "persecuted" Christians in the United States view the media as out to get them.
Bingo! Of course, some atheists do the exact same thing too.
The truth is that it is very difficult to consistently write news stories that have no bias. Most have some sort of bias - and in the vast majority of cases that bias doesn't prevent from the average reader from getting the facts of the situation. In those typical cases, I've noticed the people that act most outraged about bias are typically approaching the article with a personal bias of their own that is greater than any bias contained in the article.
There are, of course, exceptions in which bias is so bad it distorts the real meaning of the facts and can trick readers. I don't think this is anywhere near doing that, however, unless readers read only the title and none of the article.
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posted
errrm... Do you really think that anybody in the entire world has ever disapproved of collapsing smuggling tunnels? Other than the criminals profiting from them, I mean. Ya know what bugs me about this? The headline coulda been Israelis Eat Chicken Soup ... and the same screams of outrage would have occurred.
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quote: GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip (AP) - After a final burst of violence, a tenuous ceasefire began to take hold in the Gaza Strip early Tuesday after five days of intense fighting between the rival Hamas and Fatah factions left 34 people dead.
Article starts off painting Hamas and Fatah as violent, warring, whatever. Lack of context edit: in the paragraph as to why they are fighting.
But they are violent, warring, whatever. The facts are stated here. You'd want them to color those facts.
quote:Originally posted by Storm Saxon:
quote: The lull came just as Israel carried out its first response to a Palestinian suicide bombing, carrying out an air strike early Tuesday on a tunnel dug by Palestinians near the Gaza-Israel border.
Article calls the bombing a 'suicide bombing', which is biased against Palestinians.
How is calling a suicide bombing a suicide bombing "biased"? Calling it a barbarous act of vicious murder of civilians attaches a judgement to it, but calling it a suicide bombing does not. It's simple and factual identification.
quote:Originally posted by Storm Saxon: Frames the response of Israel as justified.
No, it simply frames it as a response. No one claims that it wasn't a response.
quote:Originally posted by Storm Saxon: Leaves the Palestinian a faceless drone.
You mean the scuzz who blew himself up along with 3 innocent civilians? So you want them to personalize him. That would be bias. This is straightforward, factual reporting.
quote:Originally posted by Storm Saxon: Doesn't follow up with the damage the strikes caused or give context as to the number of air strikes overall against Palestinians, the number of false airstrikes against Palestinians, the number of Palestinian dead versus the number of Israeli dead, etc.
Why is any of that relevant? Basically, you want them to introduce bias to the article, and if they don't, you call that bias?
quote:Originally posted by Storm Saxon:
quote: Previous truce deals between Hamas and Fatah struck in recent weeks of factional clashes have quickly collapsed, and it appeared unlikely the two sides would comply with all the terms of the current agreement, such as handing over all those involved in killings and abductions.
Third paragraph in. Still painting Palestinian groups as 'factional' and having 'clashes'.
It isn't painting anything. The existence of the factions, and of fighting between the factions is a matter of pure, raw fact.
quote:Originally posted by Storm Saxon: Points out killings and abductions and doesn't point out any positive aspects of Hamas or Fatah, why they were clashing.
Again, if the article doesn't introduce bias by making excuses for facts, you see that as bias. That's crap.
quote:Originally posted by Storm Saxon: In other words, the stage has been set for the Palestinians as brutes and tribal savages.
If that's your interpretation of the facts, fine. It happens to be mine as well.
quote:Originally posted by Storm Saxon: Please note that I'm not saying that there aren't articles or people in the media that aren't bias, nor am I trying to contradict what Lisa has written, exactly. I'm just saying that bias is very difficult to really pin down.
No, Storm Saxon, it really isn't.
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quote:Originally posted by aspectre: The headline coulda been Israelis Eat Chicken Soup ... and the same screams of outrage would have occurred.
Bull. This is a clear case of deliberately writing a headline for an article that tries to put a false face on what the article really says, and what is actually happening.
And for the record, the author of the article, who I know nothing about, may not be responsible for the headline. Reporters rarely are. But the newspaper is responsible for what its people do, and they should apologize for this.
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I'm sure when you consider a country yours by divine right, it's not.
Speaking of bias, one of the more difficult aspects of having discussions with you about Israel is that this fact overshadows every point that you bring up about Israel. How can I trust *you* to be unbiased about Israel when you're very dedicated to it as a religious institution?
This isn't to say that I discount everything you say about Israel. It's just that I take everything you say about Israel with a grain of salt.
Posts: 13123 | Registered: Feb 2002
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posted
To get to your reply back to me, it underlines the problem with identifying bias. I think one definition of bias is that it is the omission of information such that it favors one side or another. As such, this makes proving bias very easy, and disproving the existence of bias tremendously difficult. It may also account why everyone sees bias in the media.
Again, not to say that there isn't, but to say why it's easy to see.
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posted
Scott: It is appalling to me that I now associate "not jokes" with a preview I saw of Borat. Wayne's World was a cute movie (though dated now). Now, at least the one part of it, is poisoned for me...
Posts: 7085 | Registered: Apr 2001
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posted
I have to agree with Lisa ( !) on this one. Film at 11, assuming of course the world doesn't end first.
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!) on this one. Film at 11, assuming of course the world doesn't end first.
