Back in 2017 Matti Friedman described the dilemma of news agencies in totalitarian regimes, where the need to have inside reporters often means that honest reporting is compromised by the need to maintain good relations with the authorities.
What the AP’s Collaboration With the Nazis Should Teach Us About Reporting the News.
Did the Associated Press, the venerable American agency that is one of the world’s biggest news providers, collaborate with the Nazis during World War II? A report and new counter-report on this subject offer a few striking lessons—not just for students of history but for anyone concerned with the way news coverage shapes our perception right now.
A paper last year by the German historian Harriet Scharnberg titled “The A and P of Propaganda” and published in Studies in Contemporary History makes the case that beginning in the mid-1930s, the AP’s photo office in Germany made compromise after compromise to keep reporting under Nazi rule, obeying successive orders from the Hitler regime until it ended up as a Nazi information arm in all but name.
Decades later, in 2014, there were similar issues with AP's Pyongyang bureau:
The “bureau” in Pyongyang, wrote veteran journalist Nate Thayer, reporting for the specialist website NKNews.com, was not staffed by AP reporters from outside the country: The full-time staffers were North Koreans who were paid by AP but answered to the regime. A written agreement between the AP and the North Korean government allowed the AP to sell propaganda images, like those lovely choreographed rallies, outside the country, while the North Korean “staffers” studiously avoided subjects like mass starvation and prison camps.
And Friedman saw for himself how this worked, in Gaza:
The most relevant example from my own experience as an AP correspondent in Jerusalem between 2006 and 2011 is Gaza, which is controlled by Hamas, and where the AP has a sub-bureau. Running that sub-bureau requires both passive and active cooperation with Hamas. To give one example of many, during the Israel-Hamas war that erupted at the end of 2008, our local Palestinian reporter in Gaza informed the news desk in Jerusalem that Hamas fighters were dressed as civilians and were being counted as civilians in the death toll—a crucial detail. A few hours later, he called again and asked me to strike the detail from the story, which I did personally; someone had clearly spoken to him, and the implication was that he was at risk. (After I published this detail in an essay for Tablet in 2014, the bureau chief at the time confirmed it, adding that a refusal to comply would have put our reporter’s life in danger.)
From that moment on, more or less, AP’s coverage from Gaza became a quiet collaboration with Hamas. Certain rules were made clear to the local staffers in Gaza, and those of us outside Gaza were warned not to put our Gazan staff at risk. Our coverage shifted accordingly, though we never informed our readers. Hamas military actions were left vague or ignored, while the effects of Israeli actions were reported at length, giving the impression of wanton Israeli aggression, just as Hamas wanted.
When a reporter wrote a story about Hamas censorship in the summer of 2014, editors shelved it. We were trading truth for access and providing an illusion of “coverage” that was actually propaganda—a kind all the more effective because it was not tagged “propaganda” but simply “Gaza City (AP).” You can show genuine footage of a house destroyed by an Israeli strike, but if you don’t show the Hamas fighters launching a rocket from the backyard, your report is a lie.
Now, four years on, Lee Smith updates the story, after the AP finds itself homeless in Gaza:
Over the weekend, the Israel Defense Forces demolished a building in Gaza that the Associated Press had shared with intelligence services of the Palestinian terror group Hamas. All of the AP reporters had been advised by the IDF to evacuate the building well before the strike, but that didn’t stop a flood of righteous indignation after the bombing. “AP’s bureau has been in this building for 15 years,” the wire service’s head, Gary Pruitt, said in a statement. “We have had no indication Hamas was in the building or active in the building. This is something we actively check to the best of our ability. We would never knowingly put our journalists at risk.”
This is dishonest: The AP reporters certainly knew they had Hamas neighbors. In fact, Tommy Vietor, former spokesperson for the National Security Council under President Barack Obama, even said as much on Saturday. “I talked to someone who *used* to work out of that building periodically who said he believed there may have been Hamas offices there,” Vietor tweeted. In other words, anyone who worked in the building on a regular basis understood that they likely shared an address with the Islamic Resistance Movement. Vietor also acknowledged on Twitter that terror groups “purposefully co-locate operations with civilians. But that is not a new problem.” Terror groups use human shields, and the press apparently volunteers to shield them.
Here’s the thing: There’s nothing surprising about Western press organizations making arrangements with terror regimes. It happens all the time in the Middle East. CNN refrained from reporting on Saddam Hussein’s atrocities in Iraq in order to keep its office in Baghdad open. The New York Times famously led a tour group to the Islamic Republic of Iran.
This situation is even more overt and obvious in Gaza. The only reason a press outfit like the AP has to open a bureau there is to cover Hamas, but it’s never been interested in reporting on how the group stores missiles in homes, schools, and hospitals, or on how little of the money it receives from Tehran goes to building civilian infrastructure or responsible governance. That’s because the only story Hamas wants coming out of Gaza is about the fundamental evil of the Zionist entity. Through direct threats as well as fixers and minders appointed to steer journalists in the right direction, Hamas lets every press outfit and journalist in Gaza know that if they do not understand this fundamental angle, they are not welcome in Gaza. A reporter’s life may even depend on understanding those red lines....
Why would Western journalists agree to be shepherded by a terror organization so driven by Jew-hatred that it hides behind innocent people and sees Palestinian deaths caused by its own rocket misfires as acceptable collateral damage? For the story, of course. Since Israel’s 2005 withdrawal from Gaza and the kidnapping of IDF Corporal Gilad Shalit in 2006—roughly when the AP started renting space in the building it shared with Hamas—that story has been war with Israel, including several sizable operations that Jerusalem has labeled Cast Lead (2009), Pillar of Cloud (2012), Protective Edge (2014), and now the current engagement. Since Western journalists cannot write critically of Hamas for fear of expulsion or even harm, their war reporting is usually nothing other than an amplification of Hamas propaganda. They are in Gaza only to relay to the rest of the world an Iranian-backed terror organization’s messaging about its ongoing war with the Jewish state.
Still, there’s something noteworthy about the latest AP story: If a former Obama administration official without a Middle East portfolio knew the AP shared a building with Hamas intelligence services, then the Obama alumni who now staff the Biden administration also know it. That’s embarrassing not only for Secretary of State Antony Blinken, who phoned the head of the AP over the weekend, but also for President Joe Biden, who called Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu to complain about civilian casualties after the building was leveled. It gives the impression that the Biden team is coordinating with media operatives to lay down cover for a terror regime, which is probably why the Israeli government leaked to the press that it briefed Biden and his colleagues on the “smoking gun” evidence showing that the AP and Hamas worked out of the same building.
Thus, when Pruitt says that “the world will know less about what is happening in Gaza because of what happened today,” he is being disingenuous. It only means that one of Hamas’ useful idiots in the American press was exposed.
Somewhat related. Rashid Tlaib recently gave a speech in which she said, “what they are doing to the Palestinians they are doing to our black brothers and sisters here.” I wonder who “they” are?
Posted by: Dom | May 21, 2021 at 06:40 PM