Jay Carney and David Letterman joked on Wednesday about the ways the White House press secretary can avoid answering reporters’ questions.
Carney left his post as the White House press secretary earlier this year, and appeared on “The Late Show” to discuss his experience as part of the Obama administration. Letterman presented a list of phrases that the former press secretary has used in lieu of giving a direct answer.
They included: “I’m not going to tell you,” “See yesterday’s non-response,” “Yea, but I could be making it up.” Carney laughed, but on a more serious note, he said that the best answer sometimes is simply “I don’t know,” because being wrong has serious “repercussions.”
“They could be international, domestic or political, and in today’s media climate, that could metastasize so quickly,” he remarked. Other times, he added, he simply could not comment on classified information.
Carney had some memorable clashes with White House reporters during his tenure, and he said Wednesday that he believes the relationship between the press and the White House should be “adversarial.” Watch the segment in the clip above.
Lies and Misreporting in the Middle East: Award-winning correspondent Robert Fisk speaks out on the continuing conflict in the Middle East. From Israel and Palestine to the US involvement in Iraq, Fisk argues the media has failed to fulfill its duty as watchdog. (Published on December 1, 2013)
The book, Use With Care: A Reporter’s Glossary of Loaded Language in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, is aimed at finding neutral descriptive terms to balance media coverage.
It is intended to serve as a guide to journalists covering the region as well as the Middle East peace process.
Six anonymous Israeli and Palestinian media veterans spent a year helping to compile the guide on behalf of the IPI, the Vienna-based press freedom body.
According to a Daily Beast article on the glossary, it comprises some 150 terms ranging from “terrorist” to “martyr” with explanations of why the words are considered sensitive to Israeli and/or Palestinian audiences… MORE
Foreign journalist taking a nap on the job. Photo by Itzik Ben-Malki HAARETZ. Nov 7, 2013/ 12:43 AM
The language used by journalists covering the conflict is as visceral and bloody as the conflict itself. No handbook is going to change that fact
By Anshel Pfeffer (Nov 7, 2013/ 12:43 AM)
A few weeks after the Second Lebanon War in 2006, a senior Israel Defense Forces field commander complained about the way some Israeli news organizations covered the fighting. “If I get my hands on S. [a television reporter who will remain nameless] I’ll tear him to pieces. What does he mean by reporting about ‘the Israeli forces,’ while we’re the ones defending his sorry ass. Who does he think he is? The United Nations?”
The officer, I will add here, is not a rabid right-wing ideologist but a normally mild-mannered and well-educated man, greatly in demand by foreign correspondents for his critical analyses and intelligent briefings. He was angry at the way an Israeli journalist referred to the Israeli army, using a neutral term instead of the familiar Tzahal (IDF). The journalist didn’t reflect the feeling among the overwhelming majority of Jewish Israelis, regardless of their political stance, that it is their army, and that for all its faults its predominant role is to defend the nation. But this is a particular Israeli feeling.
Therefore, I was intrigued this week to discover in “Use With Care,” the “Reporter’s Glossary of Loaded Language in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict,” a just-published handbook by the International Press Institute, that the self-appointed arbiters of acceptable language admonish journalists who use the term “Israel Occupation Forces,” or IOF. They recommend that “It is more accurate and neutral to refer to the official name, IDF, or alternatively to the Israeli Army or Israeli forces.”
On the face of it, the attempt by IPI, an admirable organization devoted to defending freedom of the press around the world, to tone down the incendiary way the conflict is reported is a worthwhile exercise. But you have to ask yourselves whether this is at all possible and can it achieve anything. George Orwell wrote in his essay “Politics and the English Language” that “Our civilization is decadent, and our language – so the argument runs – must inevitably share in the general collapse.” In exactly the same way, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is sectarian, bloody and visceral, and much of the language used to report on it is such.
Use With Care is written in English and proposes equivalent Hebrew and Arabic expressions and alternatives to the problematic terms. Who will use it? Will it be an Israeli media outlet in the hands of right-wing publishers or those who feel that to attract readers or viewers they have to pander to the lowest populist denominator? Or the Palestinian press that is part of a society that sees a national struggle of independence the only way to ending decades of oppression and occupation? Does anyone really believe that journalists on either side will be convinced of the need to adopt more impartial and neutral terms of reference?
Using neutral vocabulary, as Haaretz, for example, tries to do in much of its coverage, is in itself a conscious political decision. Suggesting that Israeli journalists eschew mention of Judea and Samaria in favor of “West Bank” or that Palestinian writers and broadcasters drop the “occupied” before “Jerusalem” implies that either side relinquish its claim on these places. This is not neutrality. Israelis who support a two-state solution and oppose the settlements do not call the West Bank Judea and Samaria. They have already made that political decision. Likewise, Palestinians who don’t refer to Jerusalem as occupied are accepting it remaining under Israeli rule. It is not about journalism, and Israelis and Palestinians cannot be neutrals, whatever their profession.
I have no idea what state the IPI’s finances are from, but I would advise them against wasting money on printing editions in Hebrew and Arabic if they don’t want piles of the glossary raising dust and being used as doorstops and coffee-cup coasters in newsrooms throughout the region. It would be wonderful if incitement ceased from those newsrooms, but that isn’t going to happen because of a book politely asking them to do so.
Perhaps the glossary is aimed at international correspondents. But these already have a pretty well-regulated terminology, designed to reflect no partiality with either side and are continuously monitored by style editors and ombudsmen. You could perhaps imagine a freelance reporter arriving in the region with no previous knowledge of the linguistic minefield of the conflict finding some use for this booklet, but that person would probably last about 10 minutes in our cutthroat business.
Even if international news organizations adhered to the guidelines of this sanitized and bloodless lexicon, their only reason would be to avoid being harassed and harangued by tendentious groups such as CAMERA and Honest Reporting and their pro-Palestinian equivalents, and to minimize the bother of having to respond to hundreds of complaints from a tiny proportion of the readers or viewers whose only interest is in being offended. Journalists who spend their days worrying about such concerns to the extent that they need a “reporter’s glossary” have forgotten the reason they went into journalism to begin with.
Six anonymous Israeli and Palestinian journalists compiled the glossary and suggested the alternative usages. They decided to withhold their names “as a result of the current political situation in Israel and Palestine.” I think it more likely they did so because they knew they would be laughingstocks if they put their names to yet another useless product of the conflict-resolution industry that has done so little to reduce hardship for Israelis and Palestinians.
But while the glossary is ultimately a futile exercise, some of the assumptions underlying it are actually harmful. These can best be summarized in one sentence from the foreword by IPI executive director Alison Bethel McKenzie: “How this conflict is covered is important, almost as important as what is covered.” While the first part of that sentence is uncontestable, the second beggars belief. Every journalist should believe that he or she is performing a vital and valuable role in society, but in no way is the manner in which the conflict is being covered “almost as important.” This is a ridiculous and frankly immoral concept that could only have been written in the warm offices of an NGO in Vienna. How could one equate the technicalities and sensitivities of how we ply our trade with the thousands of deaths, the untold misery and deep injustice suffered on either side of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict? This breathtaking lack of proportion and unbearable smugness ruins decent journalism to a much greater extent than the most controversial language.
Hopefully one day, after a peaceful resolution of the conflict, will come decades of education for both nations in which a new generation learns to coexist. Only then will a new generation of journalists be capable of using peaceful and balanced language.
Meanwhile, coverage from both sides will continue to bloodily reflect the bloody times we live through. We’re journalists, not the United Nations.
It is encouraging to hear about this new reporters’ guidebook – one that makes the bold attempt to help journalists be more objective in their reporting of Israel-Palestine. It is encouraging at least because it recognises that the words we use are often laden with values and judgements of the kind that journalists are generally keen to avoid. Even so, to suggest that a mere substitutions of sensitive terms will in some way improve media coverage in the Middle East is patently absurd.
Certainly using the term ‘Security Fence’ rather than ‘Apartheid Wall’ to describe the barrier that separates Israel from the West Bank shows clearly which side the writer is on. Even so, the construction and deconstruction of political narratives is far more complex than any simple change in vocabulary.
To write in any detail about the suffering of the Palestinian people is in itself an act that subverts the dominant narrative. And even if writers were able to discuss the violence with clinical objectivity, this would not suggest impartiality by any means! Evil scientists have performed monstrous experiments on living beings, and that fact that they can describe their results in purely scientific terms actually reinforces the horror of their acts!
What we need is not ‘objective’ reporting (whatever that is) but reporting where the agenda is not concealed. For me personally, my sympathies are with the Palestinians, and I say that unashamedly. For me to refer to the ‘Apartheid Wall’ as anything else would be dishonest!
A new reporter’s guidebook released on October 23 aims to balance media coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, a field that often spirals into semantic mudslinging at the cost of clear news coverage.
The Vienna-based International Press Institute (IPI) published Use With Care: A Reporter’s Glossary of Loaded Language in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict after a year of joint work between six anonymous Israeli and Palestinian media veterans. The two sides worked on separate content submissions, which IPI then combined through several months of back-and-forth editing.
The glossary comprises some 150 terms ranging from “terrorist” to “martyr.” Each word or expression is presented in English, Arabic and Hebrew, with an explanation of why it might be sensitive to Israeli and/or Palestinian audiences. Most entries include a suggested alternative term.
For example, the guide explains why “Apartheid wall” and “security wall/fence” are respectively offensive to Israelis and Palestinians, recommending that journalists use “separation barrier” instead. Many of the entries also address unnecessary adjectives, asking that reporters drop the modifiers from terms like “innocent civilians” and “peaceful demonstration.”
Instead of “Judea and Samaria,” “eternal capital of the Palestinian people” or “united capital of Israel,” the guide recommends geographically specific terms like the West Bank, East Jerusalem and West Jerusalem. “Israel” is recommended over both “Zionist entity” and “Jewish state.” The former is tendentious because it is perceived to deny Israeli statehood, the guide says, while the latter ignores Arab history predating the State of Israel and implies that non-Jewish Israelis are not fully part of the state.
Other terms are less obvious. “Middle East expert” is problematic, the guide says, because ideologues and activists are often referred to as experts without disclosure of their partisan views.
“This tactic is used to magnify and repeat the views that certain journalist or media wish to promote. It is dishonest and is partly to blame for the fact that audience stereotypes and viewpoints are repeatedly reinforced instead of being challenged,” the guide says. “It creates an echo-chamber effect, in which pro-Israeli or pro-Palestinian readers, viewers, and listeners believe that only their frame of reference is reasonable and enlightened, while the other side is hateful, prejudiced, and extreme.”
The Vienna-based International Press Institute (IPI) published Use With Care: A Reporter’s Glossary of Loaded Language in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict after a year of joint work between six anonymous Israeli and Palestinian media veterans. The two sides worked on separate content submissions, which IPI then combined through several months of back-and-forth editing.
The glossary comprises some 150 terms ranging from “terrorist” to “martyr.” Each word or expression is presented in English, Arabic and Hebrew, with an explanation of why it might be sensitive to Israeli and/or Palestinian audiences. Most entries include a suggested alternative term.
For example, the guide explains why “Apartheid wall” and “security wall/fence” are respectively offensive to Israelis and Palestinians, recommending that journalists use “separation barrier” instead. Many of the entries also address unnecessary adjectives, asking that reporters drop the modifiers from terms like “innocent civilians” and “peaceful demonstration.
Instead of “Judea and Samaria,” “eternal capital of the Palestinian people” or “united capital of Israel,” the guide recommends geographically specific terms like the West Bank, East Jerusalem and West Jerusalem. “Israel” is recommended over both “Zionist entity” and “Jewish state.” The former is tendentious because it is perceived to deny Israeli statehood, the guide says, while the latter ignores Arab history predating the State of Israel and implies that non-Jewish Israelis are not fully part of the state.
Other terms are less obvious. “Middle East expert” is problematic, the guide says, because ideologues and activists are often referred to as experts without disclosure of their partisan views.
“This tactic is used to magnify and repeat the views that certain journalist or media wish to promote. It is dishonest and is partly to blame for the fact that audience stereotypes and viewpoints are repeatedly reinforced instead of being challenged,” the guide says. “It creates an echo-chamber effect, in which pro-Israeli or pro-Palestinian readers, viewers, and listeners believe that only their frame of reference is reasonable and enlightened, while the other side is hateful, prejudiced, and extreme.”
Journalists should avoid this effect by identifying each interviewee’s job, employer and basic views, the guide says.
IPI Executive Director Alison Bethel McKenzie writes in her foreword that Israeli and Palestinian journalists’ personal backgrounds often create ethical obligations in conflict with their professionalism. The guide aims not to erase those ethical convictions, but to “expose potential linguistic pitfalls” that can cause some audiences to “simply shut down and stop listening,” the authors explain.
Editor Naomi Hunt said in an email that the glossary idea started during a broader IPI project on Israeli-Palestinian dialogue last year. One Israeli in an IPI forum said journalists needed to be aware of their terminology and how it would be received by the “other side,” Hunt said, which sparked the idea of a shared reporter’s guide.
Many terms were controversial in the editing process, Hunt said, most of all “terrorist” and “occupation,” both of which are presented in the book with long explanations and no alternative.
“For both of these terms there was a strong sense on one side that you must use these words and these words only… because they are a totally accurate representation of reality,” Hunt said. “On the other side, of course, there was a sense that these words are loaded and that they are used to delegitimize, respectively, what some consider acts of resistance and Israel’s presence in the West Bank.”
Hunt’s solution was simply to “include explanations of all points of view and leave it be.” “Nakba,” for example, is presented as the Palestinian term for “the displacement of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians and the establishment of Israel,” as well as “the most traumatic collective memory for Palestinians.” Israelis refer to the same incident as the end of the 1948 “War of Independence,” the guide says without endorsing either phrase.
“Something that one person finds totally innocuous may turn out to be incredibly sensitive to someone else,” Hunt said. “The important thing is to be aware.”
The project was funded by a grant from the Foreign Ministry of Norway. Hard copies will be distributed to newsrooms in Israel and Palestine over the next few weeks. A PDF version is also immediately available by online request.
Peter Beinart, senior political writer for The Daily Beast, is associate professor of journalism and political science at City University of New York and a senior fellow at the New America Foundation. His new book, The Crisis of Zionism, was published by Times Books in April 2012.
The slickness of Israel’s spokesmen is rooted in directions set down by the pollster Frank Luntz
By Patrick Cockburn, Sunday 27th, 2014
Israeli spokesmen have their work cut out explaining how they have killed more than 1,000 Palestinians in Gaza, most of them civilians, compared with just three civilians killed in Israel by Hamas rocket and mortar fire. But on television and radio and in newspapers, Israeli government spokesmen such as Mark Regev appear slicker and less aggressive than their predecessors, who were often visibly indifferent to how many Palestinians were killed.
There is a reason for this enhancement of the PR skills of Israeli spokesmen. Going by what they say, the playbook they are using is a professional, well-researched and confidential study on how to influence the media and public opinion in America and Europe. Written by the expert Republican pollster and political strategist Dr Frank Luntz, the study was commissioned five years ago by a group called The Israel Project, with offices in the US and Israel, for use by those “who are on the front lines of fighting the media war for Israel”.
Every one of the 112 pages in the booklet is marked “not for distribution or publication” and it is easy to see why. The Luntz report, officially entitled “The Israel project’s 2009 Global Language Dictionary, was leaked almost immediately to Newsweek Online, but its true importance has seldom been appreciated. It should be required reading for everybody, especially journalists, interested in any aspect of Israeli policy because of its “dos and don’ts” for Israeli spokesmen.
These are highly illuminating about the gap between what Israeli officials and politicians really believe, and what they say, the latter shaped in minute detail by polling to determine what Americans want to hear. Certainly, no journalist interviewing an Israeli spokesman should do so without reading this preview of many of the themes and phrases employed by Mr Regev and his colleagues.
The booklet is full of meaty advice about how they should shape their answers for different audiences. For example, the study says that “Americans agree that Israel ‘has a right to defensible borders’. But it does you no good to define exactly what those borders should be. Avoid talking about borders in terms of pre- or post-1967, because it only serves to remind Americans of Israel’s military history. Particularly on the left this does you harm. For instance, support for Israel’s right to defensible borders drops from a heady 89 per cent to under 60 per cent when you talk about it in terms of 1967.”
How about the right of return for Palestinian refugees who were expelled or fled in 1948 and in the following years, and who are not allowed to go back to their homes? Here Dr Luntz has subtle advice for spokesmen, saying that “the right of return is a tough issue for Israelis to communicate effectively because much of Israeli language sounds like the ‘separate but equal’ words of the 1950s segregationists and the 1980s advocates of Apartheid. The fact is, Americans don’t like, don’t believe and don’t accept the concept of ‘separate but equal’.”
So how should spokesmen deal with what the booklet admits is a tough question? They should call it a “demand”, on the grounds that Americans don’t like people who make demands. “Then say ‘Palestinians aren’t content with their own state. Now they’re demanding territory inside Israel’.” Other suggestions for an effective Israeli response include saying that the right of return might become part of a final settlement “at some point in the future”.
There’s no shortage of images from the Gaza conflict.
We’ve seen rubble, dead Palestinian children, Israelis cowering during rocket attacks, Israeli military maneuvers and Israel Defense Forces footage of Hamas militants emerging from tunnels to attack Israeli soldiers.
What we haven’t seen are practically any images of Hamas fighters inside Gaza.
We know they’re there: Someone’s got to be launching those rockets into Israel (more than 2,800) and firing at invading Israeli troops. But so far, the only images we’ve seen (or even heard about) are the IDF’s videos of Hamas fighters using hospitals, ambulances, mosques and schools (and tunnels) to launch attacks against Israeli targets or to ferry arms around Gaza.
Why haven’t we seen journalists’ photographs of Hamas fighters inside Gaza?
We know Hamas doesn’t want the world to see images of Palestinian fighters launching rockets or using civilian havens, such as hospitals, as bases of operation. But if we’re able to see images from both sides of practically every other war — in Syria, in Ukraine, in Iraq — why is Gaza an exception?
If journalists are being threatened and intimidated when they try to document Hamas activity in Gaza, their news outlets should be out front saying so. They’re not.
It was a war routine. You leave early in the morning to see the houses destroyed the night before. Then you go to funerals, then to the hospital because more injured people arrive, and in the evening you go back to see more destroyed houses.
It was the same thing every day, just switching between Rafah and Khan Younis.
Are there attempts to document Hamas activity?
If you’re wondering whether the Times has assigned another photographer to cover this aspect of the story, so am I: The Times hasn’t been running photos of Hamas fighters in Gaza — period. Looking through the Times’s most recent three slideshows on the conflict, encompassing 37 images, there’s not a single one of a Hamas fighter.
It’s not surprising that Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has been using his account on the social media site to garner support for Israeli actions in the conflict in Gaza. By purchasing sponsored tweets, a feature of the site typically used by advertisers, he ensures that his messages appear in the feeds of more Twitter users, not just those who follow his account. This strategy is just one example of the evolving role of social media in war and conflict.
For its part, Hamas’ military wing maintains a presence on Twitter in English. Its Arabic feed was recently suspended, along with a Hebrew account, used to communicate with Israelis.
The use of social media as a tool in times of war, uprising and military conflict is nothing new. Extremist groups such as the Islamic State group, formerly known as ISIS or ISIL, have incorporated the use of social media into their broader military strategy. During the Arab Spring, Twitter was both a catalyst for social unrest, demonstrations and revolution, and a valuable resource for journalists reporting on the situation.
Social media can be used to circulate true information in the face of censorship. It can also cause false information to go viral. It has powered revolutions, but it is also used to expand the reach of violent extremists. What is the role of social media in modern warfare? How has this changed as the medium evolves? What responsibility do sites such as Facebook and Twitter have to regulate (or restrict) users’ promotion of military actions?
We invited you to weigh in in a Twitter chat. John Little (@BlogsofWar), who blogs about international relations and national security on his website Blogs of War, and PBS NewsHour foreign affairs producer @PJTobia participated as guests. Read a transcript of the conversation below.
In 1989, China’s government made a choice to combine political repression, a market economy, and globalization.
This June, as the world remembered the 25th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square movement and crackdown, much of the attention was focused on personal memories of the event. But at least as important, if not more so, is the fact that this was a turning point for China.
Though Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping started opening up China to the world and reforming the economy in the late 1970s and early 1980s, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) was cautious about the types (and pace) of change in both the political and economic spheres. The Party made progress in both, and tried hard to maintain a balance between the two, meting out economic reform with political reform.
Then came 1989.
The CCP faced a major crisis in legitimacy. Protests in Tiananmen Square were seen as a challenge to the CCP’s continued rule, and Party leaders were forced to make a choice about how to deal with the situation. Drawing on historical experiences, they concluded that without a politically stable society, China would be unable to effectively pursue economic development. (To this day, the Chinese government believes so strongly in this theory of stability that it recommends it to leaders of other developing countries.)
In 1989, the Party’s leaders decided to use all possible resources to maintain a stable society while aggressively implementing economic reforms. Over the next several years, they quickly embraced market capitalism, free trade, and globalization; stock markets opened in Shanghai and Shenzhen, banking reforms took hold, and the Party endorsed a “socialist market economy.”
At the same time, the Party rejected the old model that balanced economic reform with political reform. Any hopes of democratization were effectively halted. Compared with 25 years ago, today’s China has less freedom of speech. The state has applied tight controls, and the government’s budget for maintaining social stability is higher than the defense budget.
This was the ‘1989 Choice’: the combination of political repression with a market economy and embrace of globalization.
For better and for worse, China’s dramatic transformation over the last quarter century is due, fundamentally, to the 1989 Choice and decisions and policies that stem from it.
And what of this transformation? Data can tell us interesting stories about individual facets of China’s path since the Party made the 1989 Choice, but what about the overall narrative?
Is China’s tale over the last 25 years a success story?
Zheng Wang is the Director of the Center for Peace and Conflict Studies (CPCS), an Associate Professor in the School of Diplomacy and International Relations at Seton Hall University, and a Global Fellow at the Wilson Center. He can be reached at zheng.wang@shu.edu. Joseph O’Mahoney is an Assistant Professor in the School of Diplomacy and International Relations at Seton Hall University.
The Vienna-based International Press Institute (IPI) published Use With Care: A Reporter’s Glossary of Loaded Language in the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict after a year of joint work between six anonymous Israeli and Palestinian media veterans. The two sides worked on separate content submissions, which IPI then combined through several months of back-and-forth editing.
Example of Israeli propaganda
How can journalists be objective when writing about dead children? |… 
Escenas de dolor y desesperación tras el ataque sobre una escuela de… 
In Gaza, a Pattern of Conflict 
