A. Loewenstein Online Newsletter

Robert Fisk on why he left Murdoch’s Times (blind Zionism is the crime)

Posted: 10 Jul 2011

 
The veteran reporter rightly couldn’t tolerate an owner who put his love for Israel above the truth (which is something we still see in Murdoch titles across the world):

Oddly, he [Murdoch] never appeared the ogre of evil, darkness and poison that he’s been made out to be these past few days. Maybe it’s because his editors and sub-editors and reporters repeatedly second-guessed what Murdoch would say. Murdoch was owner of The Times when I covered the blood-soaked Israeli invasion and occupation of Lebanon in 1982. Not a line was removed from my reports, however critical they were of Israel. After the invasion, Douglas-Home and Murdoch were invited by the Israelis to take a military helicopter trip into Lebanon. The Israelis tried to rubbish my reporting; Douglas-Home said he stood up for me. On the flight back to London, Douglas-Home and Murdoch sat together. “I knew Rupert was interested in what I was writing,” he told me later. “He sort of waited for me to tell him what it was, although he didn’t demand it. I didn’t show it to him.”
But things changed. Before he was editor, Douglas-Home would write for the Arabic-language Al-Majella magazine, often deeply critical of Israel. Now his Times editorials took an optimistic view of the Israeli invasion. He stated that “there is now no worthy Palestinian to whom the world can talk” and – for heaven’s sake – that “perhaps at last the Palestinians on the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip will stop hoping that stage-strutters like Mr Arafat can rescue them miraculously from doing business with the Israelis.”
All of which, of course, was official Israeli government policy at the time.
Then, in the spring of 1983, another change. I had, with Douglas-Home’s full agreement, spent months investigating the death of seven Palestinian and Lebanese prisoners of the Israelis in Sidon. It was obvious, I concluded, that the men had been murdered – the grave-digger even told me that their corpses had been brought to him, hands tied behind their backs, showing marks of bruising. But now Douglas-Home couldn’t see how we would be “justified” in running a report “so long after the event”.
In other words, the very system of investigative journalism – of fact-checking and months of interviews – became self-defeating. When we got the facts, too much time had passed to print them. I asked the Israelis if they would carry out a military inquiry and, anxious to show how humanitarian they were, they duly told us there would be an official investigation. The Israeli “inquiry” was, I suspected, a fiction. But it was enough to “justify” publishing my long and detailed report. Once the Israelis could look like good guys, Douglas-Home’s concerns evaporated.
…
These past two weeks, I have been thinking of what it was like to work for Murdoch, what was wrong about it, about the use of power by proxy. For Murdoch could never be blamed. Murdoch was more caliph than ever, no more responsible for an editorial or a “news” story than a president of Syria is for a massacre – the latter would be carried out on the orders of governors who could always be tried or sacked or sent off as adviser to a prime minister – and the leader would invariably anoint his son as his successor. Think of Hafez and Bashar Assad or Hosni and Gamal Mubarak or Rupert and James. In the Middle East, Arab journalists knew what their masters wanted, and helped to create a journalistic desert without the water of freedom, an utterly skewed version of reality. So, too, within the Murdoch empire.

This is what we call Israeli democracy (and why we laugh)

Posted: 10 Jul 2011

George Galloway: “Rupert Murdoch was hacking the phones of our dead soldiers”

Posted: 10 Jul 2011

Murdoch empire made of rock, cheese and bullets

Posted: 10 Jul 2011

Al-Jazeera’s Listening Post on Syria media restrictions

Posted: 10 Jul 2011 05:43 AM PDT

The struggle for democracy in Syria has continued for most of this year. The media has been largely locked out of the country, so independent reporting has been very difficult (though local bloggers have remained essential).
Al Jazeera’s Listening Post discusses the crackdown and I was asked to comment (my last appearance on the show was in February on the Egyptian revolution). My comment is at 9.26:

Israel, you have a PR problem (hint; you can’t give up oppressing Arabs)

Posted: 09 Jul 2011

 
And these wonderfully inventive stunts will only increase:

Israel is being confronted by what observers call an increasingly formidable form of pro-Palestinian activism – foreign nationals staging non-violent publicity stunts.
Israel’s reaction to these international incidents, critics said, have played into the hands of activists, who blitzed news organisations to cover their protests.
The latest protest, organised through social-networking websites and e-mails, featured American and European activists planning to fly to Israel’s Ben Gurion Airport during the weekend and declare their intention to visit “Palestine”.
Israel responded by deploying hundreds of security personnel to the airport to help deport arriving activists and pressuring European carriers to hand over passenger manifests and prevent suspected activists from flying into the country.
The activists’ plans were quashed, with more than 120 detained at the airport and many more denied boarding their Tel Aviv-bound flights.
Those held at the airport would be deported within the next “24 to 48 hours”, a police spokesman said last night.
Only weeks earlier, Israel faced another news frenzy surrounding hundreds of foreign activists who tried, and eventually failed, to sail into the Israeli-blockaded Gaza Strip from Greece. The participants were branded by Israel’s military as radicals possibly carrying lethal chemical agents on their ships.
Flotilla organisers, calling themselves peaceful, replied with headline-grabbing accusations that Israel had sabotaged their boats.
Writing in Israel’s Yediot Ahronot daily last week, Haim Zisovitch, the head of the communication unit at Bar Ilan University’s School of Communication, compared Israel’s response to a wayward “child who was late to come home at night, and in order not to alert his sleeping parents used drums and trumpets to cover up the sound of his steps”.

Murdoch’s ethical bypass (and lieutenants who back it)

Posted: 09 Jul 2011

 
Bruce Guthrie is a former News Limited editor and author of Man Bites Murdoch. He writes today in Fairfax papers that the challenging of the Murdoch empire reveals a hollow moral core:

In 1988, while attending a conference of News Corporation editors in Aspen, Colorado, I made the mistake of raising the thorny issue of journalistic ethics. The proprietor, Rupert Murdoch, was not amused. Murdoch, who was hosting the session, turned red, then purple, as I repeatedly asked a senior executive from his London Sun whether the publication had any ethical framework. It didn’t, the paper’s news editor finally admitted.
In most media companies that admission might have earned the executive a rebuke. But instead, I copped it, with Murdoch later dismissing me as a ”Fairfax wanker”. (For the record, I wasn’t at that point; I became one 12 months later.)
I have reflected on the episode many times since, particularly this week as the News of the World phone hacking scandal went from bad to worse and then putrid.
I left that conference more than 20 years ago concerned that Murdoch saw ethics, or at least the discussion of them, as an inconvenience that got in the way of newspaper business. If that really is the case, should we be entirely surprised that the phone hacking scandal played out at one of his titles and that it ended in its forced closure?
…
It seems inconceivable that no one at a very senior level has yet paid with their job. Rebekah Brooks, a former News of the World editor now in charge of Murdoch’s British operation, seems to have the boss’s backing and he’s not for changing. This is what happens when companies are run like personal fiefdoms. In the absence of any real shareholder pressure, people like Brooks get to hang on. At a company with a more open and broad-based share register she’d almost certainly be gone by now. News seems very comfortable with accommodating people who’d be shown the door elsewhere.