{"id":20404,"date":"2012-07-23T12:00:24","date_gmt":"2012-07-23T11:00:24","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/?p=20404"},"modified":"2012-07-22T18:31:38","modified_gmt":"2012-07-22T17:31:38","slug":"journalism-vs-propaganda","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/2012\/07\/journalism-vs-propaganda\/","title":{"rendered":"Journalism vs Propaganda"},"content":{"rendered":"

The US and Israel blame Iran for the suicide attack in Bulgaria, but offer no evidence for the accusation.<\/em><\/p>\n

Almost immediately after a suicide bomber killed five Israeli tourists in Bulgaria on Wednesday [Jul 18 2012], Israeli officials, led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu,\u00a0blamed Iran<\/a>, an accusation uncritically repeated by most Western media outlets even as Bulgarian investigators warned<\/a> it would be a \u201cmistake\u201d to assign blame before the attack could be investigated. Now, Israel, along with the U.S., is blaming Hezbollah and, therefore, Iran for the attack. Today\u2019s New York Times<\/em>\u00a0article<\/a>\u00a0by Nicholas Kulish and Eric Schmitt\u00a0\u2013 headlined \u201cHezbollah Is Blamed for Attack on Israeli Tourists in Bulgaria\u201d \u2013\u00a0uncritically treats those accusations as confirmed fact despite no evidence being offered for it:<\/p>\n

American officials on Thursday identified<\/strong> the suicide bomber responsible for a deadly attack on Israeli vacationers here as a member of a Hezbollah cell that was operating in Bulgaria and looking for such targets, corroborating\u00a0<\/strong>Israel\u2019s assertions and making the bombing a new source of tension with Iran.<\/p>\n

One senior American official said the current American intelligence assessment was that the bomber, who struck Wednesday, killing five Israelis, had been \u201cacting under broad guidance\u201d to hit Israeli targets when opportunities presented themselves, and that the guidance had been given to Hezbollah, a Lebanese militant group, by Iran, its primary sponsor. Two other American officials confirmed<\/strong> that Hezbollah was behind the bombing, but declined to provide additional details<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

The attacks, the official said, were in retaliation for the assassinations of Iranian nuclear scientists, for which Iran has blamed Israeli agents \u2014 an accusation that Israel has neither confirmed nor denied. \u201cThis was tit for tat,\u201d said the American official, who spoke on condition of anonymity because the investigation was still under way. . . .<\/p>\n

A senior Israeli official said on Thursday that the Burgas attack was part of an intensive wave of terrorist attacks around the world carried out by two different organizations, the Iranian Quds Force, an elite international operations unit within Iran\u2019s Islamic Revolutionary Guards Corps, as well as by Hezbollah.<\/p>\n

By \u201cidentified,\u201d \u201cconfirmed\u201d and \u201ccorroborated\u201d Iranian and Hezbollah responsibility, what The\u00a0New York Times<\/em>\u00a0means is this: American officials asserted that this was so, even as they \u201cdeclined to provide additional details\u201d and even though \u201cthe investigation was still under way.\u201d Indeed, this accusation is, as the NYT<\/em>\u00a0sees it,\u00a0\u201dconfirmed\u201d and \u201ccorroborated\u201d even though \u201cno details yet about the bomber like his name or nationality\u201d are known; even though their anonymous American source \u201cdeclined to describe what specific intelligence \u2014 intercepted communications, analysis of the bomber\u2019s body parts or other details \u2014 []led analysts to conclude that the bomber belonged to Hezbollah\u201d; even though \u201cthe Bulgarians are still trying to figure out how the bomber entered the country, how he traveled around and where he stayed\u201d; and even though the Bulgarian Foreign Minister said: \u201cWe\u2019re not pointing the finger in any direction until we know what happened and complete our investigation.\u201d\u00a0All The Paper of Record knows\u00a0is that U.S. and Israeli officials have blamed Iran and Hezbollah, and \u2014 as usual \u2014 that\u2019s good enough for them. Identified, Confirmed and Corroborated.<\/p>\n

By stark contrast, The Washington Post<\/em>\u2018s\u00a0Karin Brulliard, reporting from Jerusalem, commits an act of actual journalism with her story<\/a> on this event. She, too, notes the official accusations of Hezbollah and Iranian responsibility, but, as Think Progress\u2019 Ali Gharib points out<\/a>, she heavily qualifies that in the third paragraph of her story: \u201cIsrael offered no concrete evidence tying the\u00a0bombing\u00a0to Iran<\/strong>, and Bulgarian officials cautioned that it was too early to attribute responsibility.\u201d That\u2019s called basic journalism: instead of just repeating official claims, treating them as \u201cconfirmed,\u201d and shaping the entire article around those assertions, she prominently notes that there is no real evidence<\/strong>\u00a0to lead anyone to believe these accusations. She then adds more skepticism: \u201cU.S. intelligence officials said it was \u2018plausible\u2019 that Hezbollah carried out the attack but that analysts at the CIA and other agencies were still evaluating the intelligence surrounding the bombing and had not reached a conclusion<\/strong>.\u201d<\/p>\n

I have no idea who is behind the attacks. If it turns out to be Hezbollah and\/or Iran, that will not shock me: after all, if it is perceived that you have\u00a0sent hit squads<\/a> onto a country\u2019s soil to murder their nuclear scientists<\/a>, it\u2019s likely that the targeted nation will want to respond with violence of their own. But there is no evidence to confirm the American and Israeli accusations. A reader of the New York Times<\/em>\u00a0article would not know that, while a reader of Brulliard\u2019s article in the Post<\/em>\u00a0would. That\u2019s the difference between journalism and propaganadistic stenography. It\u2019s really not that difficult or complex, when repeating government claims, to note clearly and prominently that no evidence has been furnished to support those claims.<\/p>\n

* * * * *<\/p>\n

Following up on the argument I made<\/a> about the Syria bombing \u2014 that Western political and media circles would treat the attack on Syrian officials as something to praise: the U.S. State Department, even when assuming it was a suicide bomb, refused to denounce the attack<\/a> and came close to praising it, while The New York Times<\/em>\u00a0referred<\/a>\u00a0to the rebels\u2019 \u201cbrazen assassination of top security officials.\u201d While denying responsibility for the Bulgarian attack, Iranian officials noted this posture:<\/p>\n

The speaker of Iran\u2019s Parliament, Ali Larijani, criticized the United States for not condemning the bombing in Damascus on Wednesday that struck at President Bashar al-Assad\u2019s inner circle, killing three senior defense officials. \u201cBy not condemning the assassination in Syria, the Americans show that they believe in good assassinations and bad assassinations<\/strong>,\u201d he said, according to the Fars news agency.<\/p>\n

Indeed, in one of the grandest understatements of the year, State Department spokesperson Victoria Nuland, when asked about U.S. policy toward Israeli human rights abuses, recently acknowledged<\/a>: \u201cWe are not always consistent.\u201d That\u2019s true even when it comes to the question of what counts as Terrorism and whether it is good or bad.<\/p>\n

Go to Original \u2013 salon.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Almost immediately after a suicide bomber killed five Israeli tourists in Bulgaria on Wednesday [Jul 18 2012], Israeli officials, led by Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, blamed Iran, an accusation uncritically repeated by most Western media outlets even as Bulgarian investigators warned it would be a \u201cmistake\u201d to assign blame before the attack could be investigated.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[62],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-20404","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-media"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20404","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=20404"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/20404\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=20404"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=20404"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.transcend.org\/tms\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=20404"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}