October 18 Media Critique: "Bad News From the Netherlands"

A project sets out to prove that any country can be made to look like a pariah.

This is the epitome of HRs ‘confusion’.

HR is referring to a project by the Jerusalem Centre for Public Affairs that does what the title of this latest embarrassment from HR suggests. And so what? We now know that there is crime in the Netherlands. Is that really news to anyone?

There is something that you won’t read about in the JCPAs bizarre little ‘project’ (read it for a good laugh); and that is stories about the Dutch occupation and settlement enterprise. That’s because there isn’t one. You could report every single piece of “bad news” from the Netherlands, and it still wouldn’t be a “pariah”, because it would simply be the kind of news that one sees in every newspaper. However, if they were to start expropriating land outside their internationally recognized borders and started to expel the locals and build Dutch settlements, then it would be a very different story.

Perhaps HR are alluding to the media penchant for ‘if it bleeds it leads’. According to HRs logic, news organizations must be biased against the entire world – they're always reporting the "bad news".

HR’s problem is one of bias – its' own. Being the strident and extreme pro-Israel partisans that they are, they can’t tolerate reporting of Israel that produces a negative impression. Unfortunately for HR, it only requires reporting of the facts to create a negative impression. Perhaps HR and the silly JCPA think that media reporting about the conflict in Sudan is an example of bias? – after all it creates a very negative impressions of Sudan, making it a “pariah”. I strongly suspect that their ‘bias’ theory wouldn’t be applied in this case.

HRs problem is that it views media reporting through the prism of its’ own partisanship, and anything that is “bad news” is not factual reporting about a bad situation, but is bias. Hearing something that you don’t like does not make the source of that information biased - unless you are a fanatic.

Like HonestReporting.

Update: Here’s another ‘bad news’ site, which you can compare with Bad News from the Netherlands and judge for yourself whether the obvious differences stem from ‘bias’ or just reflect a different set of facts.