Compassion for Journalists: Sucking the Wire Services Firehose
Adding a bit more balance to "Live Updates" reporting
[Image: a screen grab from the ABC’s Live Updates reporting.]
Published: 2023-11-07
Introduction
While books have been written on the Israel/Palestine issue, a hyper-brief summary might be:
After the gifting of the Mandate of Palestine to Great Britain as a part of the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire after WWI, the Zionist settlers moved in and following WWII created such trouble for the UK by doing things like attacking the local Palestinian population and false flagging the bombing of the King David Hotel that Britain found the "mandate" ungovernable. The successor the League of Nations which had gifted the mandate to the UK was the UN which then proposed two solutions so that Britain didn't have to deal with the administrative trouble, the two state and federal solutions for the territory as outlined in the 1947 publication by the UN.
The invading white-supremacist Jewish Zionists executed the Nakba, declared independence and have for the last 75 years been running a policy of progressive genocide and repression against the Palestinian people so consistently that even US Human Rights organisations like Human Rights Watch labeled Israel as an Apartheid state.
Live Updates
During the current outbreak of violence which is resulting in images of dismembered babies of refugees appearing on the screens of sensitive people via the western media, due to the old adage of 'If it bleeds it leads', poor journalists at the ABC need to rotate through what must be one of the nastiest jobs in journalism: the "Live Updates" punishment.
There the journalist needs to sit and suck the firehose of variable quality slanted reporting coming out of the three dominant English language 'wire services', Reuters, Associated Press (AP) and Agence-France Presse (AFP). From this geyser of sewage relevant 'newsworthy' stories need to be identified and some parts thereof published as “updates” . Other articles which actually represent the holocaust era death and destruction being rained down upon the babies, women, children, grandparents, doctors, teachers and the rest of Gaza's civil society must also be inserted into the "Live Updates" to balance the coverage.
I feel a deep sense of compassion for the journalists who need to rotate through this sufferance, for rotate they do, and suffer they must.
Headlines
Lets not pick on the poor journalists, but the editors or whoever writes the headlines. Below is the style of 'headline re-write' the newsletter occasionally does for Antiwar. In that case it is to insert some humor. Below are corrections to actually make sense of what the article should be saying.
All headlines are from these two mobile screen grabs of the ABC ‘Live updates’ article as of around 08:30 AEDT 2023-11-07
[The two mobile phone screen grabs]
Hamas security chief killed in air strike, IDF says
Israel kills more civilians by dropping more bombs; claims one of them had something to do with security
Israeli solider injured in Jerusalem stabbing
A border police officer who oppresses Palestinians for a living was injured on duty
Israel encircles Gaza City in 'significant stage' of conflict
Israel puts even more security forces around Gaza to continue the siege but they’ve yet to demonstrate any bravery to attack actual soldiers rather than just dropping bombs on civilians
'Free Palestine' Greens members walk out of Senate chambers in protest
Some Australian politicians are using their office to express outrage at thousands of children being murdered.
Disappeared sub-articles
Jordan King: Air force dropped urgent medical aid in Gaza
Jordan bypasses Israeli blockade with air force to drop essential aid to civilians dying in Gaza while Israel continues to drop death
Hezbollah says Israel to 'pay price' after strike kills 3 children in Lebanon
Israel attempts to widen conflict by illegally attacking Lebanon after it got warned by Russia not to do this to Syria.
Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu backtracks on reported comment linking Hamas attack to reservist protest
Netanyahu still can’t omit spewing falsehoods with his political messaging
US Secretary of State Anthony Blinken arrives in Turkiye as part of Israel-Gaza diplomatic push
Blinkenlights attempts an up-close-and-personal threat to Erdogan to split united Arab and Muslim outrage at the ongoing Israeli atrocities
Each of the above headlines was unavailable via DuckDuckGo search, while those further above were.
This is more likely to be due to changing headlines and page updates scrolling older parts “off the end” than a censorship/scrubbing process.
The above image includes one successful search as proof that at least one of the searches was possible. It landed here, though that is likely to have changed by the time you get there :)
Such are the challenges of report on ‘live’ events.
Sources
Israel-Gaza war: Israeli forces encircle Gaza City as conflict enters 'significant stage', ABC, 2023-11-06
Israel-Gaza war live updates: US, Israel discuss 'tactical pause' and hostage talks, ABC, 2023-11-07
UNITED NATIONS SPECIAL COMMITTEE ON PALESTINE, REPORT TO THE GENERAL ASSEMBLY, VOLUME 1, U.N. 1947
Muching on Palestine, YesXorNo, 2023-10-25
Culture
Wheatus - Sunshine, from their self titled 2000 debut album, uploaded 2012-02-19
🙄
Copyleft: CC0