Dr. Manfred Gerstenfeld is the Chairman of the Board of Fellows of one of Israel's leading think tanks, the Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs.
He has devised a new project which exposes how much of the world's media present Israel and the Middle East conflict in a negative light.
His project reveals that the same filters applied to foreign reportage about any ordinary country (in this case, Holland) would create a similarly negative public impression.
Jamie Glazov interviews Dr. Gerstenfeld in Frontpage Magazine.com's "Distorting Israel."
"Trevor Asserson, (is) a leading British litigation lawyer. He has undertaken a number of well documented studies which detail the BBC’s systematic bias against Israel. This is particularly important because the BBC is probably Europe’s most influential media and as Asserson has outlined, a major distorter of information on Israel. The credibility of Asserson’s work has recently increased even further. In past months, the BBC’s manipulations have been exposed in many other fields. This forced them to suspend several employees and inter alia, to apologize both to the British Queen and Prime Minister Gordon Brown. ...
To cover the entire field of anti-Israel media bias is a mission impossible. The methods are almost infinite and vary from crude to subtle ones. There is also a cumulative effect of such distortion. Therefore paradigmatic pilot studies of systematic bias are so important.
Asserson has done that remarkably by investigating such an important media as the BBC. I understood that even better when I interviewed him for one of my books Israel and Europe: An Expanding Abyss?
Asserson listed in great detail how the BBC regularly in its reporting on Israel, broke many of the 15 legal obligations it is committed to under its monopolistic charter. These include that the media has to be fair, respect the truth, should not broadcast its own opinions on current affairs or current policy, ensure that opposing views are not misrepresented and not let the audience gauge the reporter’s personal views. He listed hundreds of examples of breaking these rules. The list is far too long to be exposed here.
To mention one, there was a huge contrast in how the BBC reported on the British soldiers in Iraq, who were described in warm and glorified terms, whereas Israeli troops were painted as faceless, ruthless and brutal killers.
There are hundreds of ways to be unfair in one’s reporting. One of the most powerful is omission of crucial facts and context of certain actions. If one starts from the false assumption that Israel, through an aggressive war, has conquered Arab territories in 1967 while omitting the genocidal statements against Jews of Palestinian Arab leaders since about 1930, the non-acceptance of the Arabs to create a second Palestinian state in addition to Jordan in 1948 and also ignores the genocidal Arab invasion of the former Palestinian Mandate territory in 1948, one has laid in a simple way the infrastructure for diabolizing Israel.
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