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March 23, 2001/Adar 28, 5761, Vol. 53, No.25
British Israel coverage 'unfair'
RICHARD ALLEN GREENE
Jewish Telegraphic Agency
LONDON - As clashes between Israel and the Palestinians continue for a sixth month, many Jews in the United Kingdom are concerned that Israel is not getting a fair hearing in the British press.
The Guardian newspaper has been the subject of the harshest criticism, but another daily newspaper, The Independent, and the BBC have also raised concern.
"Israel is portrayed as a brutal regime interested only in hurting Palestinians," said Hagai Segal of the World Zionist Organization. Segal was a speaker at a recent panel on the topic, "Does Israel get a fair hearing in the media?"
The British press sees "Israel as a superpower and the Palestinians as poor people who want peace, and neither perspective is remotely accurate," Segal told JTA.
Part of the problem, he said, is that the British press in general tends to side with underdogs.
D.J. Schneeweis, the Israeli press attache in London, agreed.
"There is a tendency in many quarters of the media to go softly on the perceived weaker side in any conflict - in this case, the Palestinians," he said.
"The presumption is that if more Palestinians than Israelis are being killed, it must be the Israelis using force."
Segal said the problem has gotten worse since the Palestinian uprising broke out at the end of September.
After the Oslo peace process began in 1993, "there was more neutral, balanced, non-emotive reporting," he said. "But now it's like the 1980s again," when the press was strongly critical of Israeli tactics in the original Palestinian uprising.
The paper that has come in for the strongest condemnation is The Guardian, a London daily that is the choice of the left-leaning intelligentsia. Last month it was the target of an e-mail campaign begun by a group called Honest Reporting.com.
Started by a couple of Londoners last October to monitor what they saw as anti-Israel bias in the press, Honest Reporting was soon taken over by Media Watch International, a new group based in New York.
When the Guardian reported that a man who killed eight Israelis by plowing his bus into a group of soldiers and civilians in mid-February was seen "in the Gaza Strip as a sort of Palestinian everyman who finally snapped," Honest Reporting encouraged its 12,000 e-mail subscribers to write to the paper to complain.
The campaign got an immediate response from the newspaper. Four days after the Honest Reporting petition went out, The Guardian's comment editor, David Leigh, wrote an article saying that hundreds of e-mails had come in from around the world about the bus driver article.
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