Mainstream media and balance in Iran
Just a quick note on how mainstream media outlets implement “balance”. Iran recently held a conference questioning the Jewish holocaust. The BBC wrote an article on this, and in that article said:
Participants include a number of well-known "revisionist" Western academics. American David Duke, a former leader of the Ku Klux Klan, is to present a paper.
But a number of Jewish rabbis are also there. One, British Rabbi Ahron Cohen, said he had come to the conference to put the "Orthodox Jewish viewpoint" across.
"We certainly say there was a Holocaust, we lived through the Holocaust. But in no way can it be used as a justification for perpetrating unjust acts against the Palestinians," he said.
Ahron Cohen is a member of Neturei Karta. By “unjust acts against the Palestinians” they mean the very existence of Israel. On their web site they call for the United Nations to “correct” the error made when the U.N. recognized Israel:
Rabbi Blau stated shortly before his death that the acceptance by the United Nations of the Zionist state as a member state constituted a grave injustice to the Jewish people. Neturei Karta hope that this great error will be corrected at the earliest opportunity.
They believe that Israel’s existence is heresy. They refer to it as the “so-called ‘State of Israel’” and the “illegitimate heretical ‘Israeli’ regime” and believe all of Israel should be turned over to the Palestinians.
None of that appeared in the BBC article.
One of the tenets of balance in the mainstream media is that you must have experts from both sides of a controversy. If you can’t find any one on one side, you have to make them up. Thus, even an article on a holocaust revisionist conference can’t be written from the perspective that it’s just plain wrong. There has to be some reason that it might not be wrong. Otherwise your article isn’t balanced.
If they’d written the article a few days earlier, they could have mentioned another attendee who doesn’t question the holocaust. Khaled Kasab Mahameed had been invited, but was forbidden entry into Iran. Mahameed, who maintains a Holocaust museum in Nazareth, argues that questioning obvious historical fact doesn’t advance the Palestinian cause.
Given the quality of media coverage in the Middle East, he may be wrong. The truth is not always balanced.
- Iran Holocaust conference opens
- “The first question to be posed is: Did the Holocaust actually happen or not? And the second one is: If it did happen, what was the scale of it?”
- Holocaust Scholars Are Not Welcome In Iran
- “The Iranian regime hosts its Holocaust denial conference this week, the long-promoted effort of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. The Iranian president says he wants an unbiased look at the evidence of the Nazi genocide of European Jews during World War II, and he’s inviting every nutcase in the Northern Hemisphere to attend the conference. However, one Palestinian has found his invitation withdrawn.”
- Neturei Karta at Wikipedia
- “Some among Neturei Karta took proactive steps to condemn Israel and bring about its eventual dismantling until the coming of the Messiah. Chief among these is Rabbi Moshe Hirsch, Neturei Karta’s self-proclaimed ‘Foreign Minister’, author of its prayer book Siddur Vilna, who served in Yasser Arafat's cabinet as Minister for Jewish Affairs.”
- Khaled Kasab Mahameed at Wikipedia
- “the facts must not be denied… It is the obligation of all Arabs and all Muslims to understand the significance of the Holocaust. If their goal is to understand their adversary, they must understand the Holocaust.”
- What is the Neturei Karta?
- “Rabbi Blau stated shortly before his death that the acceptance by the United Nations of the Zionist state as a member state constituted a grave injustice to the Jewish people. Neturei Karta hope that this great error will be corrected at the earliest opportunity.”
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Note that they’ve since rewritten that article. The new article changes “a number of Jewish rabbis” to “a small group of Jewish rabbis” and adds more information about the Neturei Karta, including that by and large they’re regarded as “freaks”. Well, yeah. By everyone except the journalist who wrote the original article for the BBC. And their editor.