In the summer of 2006, a small army of websites, led by littlegreenfootballs.com, brought massive embarrassment to the Reuters wire service. The sites drew attention to a Reuters photo of the Beirut skyline after a single Israeli explosive had landed; the skyline had been amateurishly altered to make the “Israeli bombardment” look far more extensive. Knowing that “if it bleeds; it leads,” and apparently desperate to sell his shot, the klutzy photographer had used Adobe Photoshop to take a portion of smoke and replicate it all over the Beirut sky. Reuters photo editors — who may have been harried, but who don’t tend to question charges of Israeli disproportionate force anyway — had released the doctored image to its billions of media-outlet subscribers.
Once that gaffe received public attention, the game was on. Dozens more doctored or staged Reuters photos came to light. In one, an elderly woman wore a headscarf, her arms raised to heaven as she stood in front of a crumbled building somewhere in Lebanon. The caption read, “A Lebanese woman wails after looking at the wreckage of her apartment, in a building, [sic] that was demolished by the Israeli attacks in southern Beirut.” The problem was that the same woman struck the same pose in front of other bombed buildings for Reuters photos. All received captions about a woman mourning the loss of her home. “Either this woman is the unluckiest multiple home owner in
Beirut, or something isn’t quite right,” commented one blogger.
It’s not just the blogosphere. Israel has changed too. There’s a new generation of leaders. Tzipi Livni and Ehud Olmert’s critics say they’re too yuppie-ish, too clever by half, out of touch with military realities, and over-dependent on diplomacy. On the other hand, they are doing something that supporters of Israel have suggested for some time: They are rolling up their sleeves and make making an attempt to fight the “Other War,” the media war.
The Israeli Defense Force (IDF), for example, has just launched a YouTube channel, and is using it to broadcast footage they say shows rockets launched from residential areas in Gaza. According the
Jerusalem Post, it has become “the second-most popular channel on the popular global video-sharing site, drawing over 386,000 page views in the first half of Thursday alone. Meanwhile, the IDF has been in regular contact with over 50 major American blogs covering the fighting.” (Hamas supporters — not to be outdone — are trying to get YouTube to take the IDF footage down and put up their own footage of purported civilian casualties.)
And in the next a few days, Tzipi Livni will participate a sort of a mass, open conference call in which, according to the organizers, she will “brief participants on the latest developments in Israel’s efforts to stop Hamas terrorism, international reaction and diplomatic initiatives.” It’s unlikely this will actually work (an ordinary conference call is hard enough to set up), but the effort is significant.
Another factor affecting coverage is the Israelis’ controversial decision to keep reporters out of Gaza. (This is similar to Israel’s 2002 decision to bar the media from the Jenin refugee camp, a choice that’s debated to this day.) The media could make the shut-out a story in itself — setting up feet from the Gaza/Israel border and talking about “what Israel won’t let you see” — but given the reporters who have been kidnapped and held hostage reporting in Gaza, journalists seem almost relieved to have an excuse to stay out.
Further, keeping reporters out of the strip virtually forces them into besieged towns like Sderot, Ashkelon, and Beersheba in pursuit of the high drama news crews need. This is the kind of context — Israelis running for cover, Israeli towns under bombardment — that has been conspicuously missing until now.
Other facts on the ground have changed as well. Israel is now fighting Hamas, which makes no attempt to hide its aggressiveness. It proudly invites reporters to photograph their soldiers launching rockets into Israel. This is a huge contrast from Fatah, which strove to present a placid, diplomatic face to the world.
We are witnessing a new, chastened mainstream media. The blogosphere bludgeoning has worked. A superego has been created where there was none. Denizens of the blogosphere, the ones who over the last nine years have used the web to fight for truth in this conflict, should take a small victory lap — but then get back to their PCs.
— Stephanie Gutmann is the author of The Other War: Israeli, Palestinians and the Struggle for Media Supremacy.< Back 1 2 
