The Greatest Journalistic Malpractice In History

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French Media And Al-Dura Case Is The Greatest Journalistic Malpractice In History

By Herb Denenberg
The Bulletin
July 3, 2008

This may be an account of the most disgraceful and disgusting journalistic malpractice in history. Consider the case:

A journalist does a story on the killing of a young Palestinian, blaming Israel for the death.

The image of the killing becomes an icon for the Palestinians and the inspiration for violence and murder of Jews throughout the world.

After using the symbol as an excuse for violence and murder and as a call for genocide, overwhelming evidence proves the whole report of the killing was a hoax, a phony staged event.

The reporter, who put the piece together, is demonstrated to be a liar and a fraud, just as his report on the killing is demonstrated to be a hoax and a fraud. He refused to let anyone see the whole tape, which - when viewed - made it obvious his report was hoax and he was a liar.

This is all documented by an overwhelming collection of evidence as well as by the decision of an appellate court, which decided a libel suit filed by the perpetrators of the hoax against those who exposed it.

In view of the fact that the reporter was exposed as a fraud and a liar, you would think he would pay some sort of price in his standing and perhaps even be fired.

What happened? In less than a week after the truth finally got out, a French newsweekly got together a petition defending the fraud and liar reporter and the hoax story. It was signed by over 300 journalists and hundreds of others including celebrity intellectuals.

So when the lie is finally exposed after about eight years, this group of journalists and celebrities continue to defend the lie and the liar.

This is incredible, and it is much worse than the brief summary above can possibly communicate.

This happened in France, and involved the al-Dura shooting. I have previously written about it, because after eight years of perpetuating a fraud and a hoax, when the truth finally came out, what did the mainstream media do? It ignored the story. (See my column, "Major Media Outlets Ignore Front-Page Hoax: Refuse to Print Any Correction.") Even knowing that the false report had led to violence and murder, most of the mainstream media issued no retractions, no corrections, and no clarifications. Knowing that they had blood on their hands already, mainstream outlets - such as the New York Times and Philadelphia Inquirer - ignored the al-Dura truth. That's why I say the mainstream media are actually willing to incite murder and violence with false reports, and even when called on to correct those false reports, they ignore the truth and are content to let the violence and killing continue. The omission was called to the attention of papers like the Philadelphia Inquirer. But they still did not correct their long history of lies and deceptions and their playing accessory to violence and murder. If I was an editor or owner of the Inquirer, I would not want to go through life knowing I had blood on my hands.

That treatment by the U.S. mainstream media is bad enough. But what is worse is the account I gave above of what happened in France. France 2, a state-run television network, was responsible for airing and defending the story of its reporter in the Middle East, one Charles Enderlin. Even after its story was exposed as a hoax and a fraud, it refused to retract it, continued to defend it, and then even sued a French blogger and media watchdog, Philippe Karsenty, who had exposed the hoax. It was that lawsuit that led to the decision of the appellate court exposing the report of the al-Dura shooting as a hoax.

When a few French reporters finally had access to the al-Dura tape, this is what they saw, as reported in a wonderful article by Anne-Elisabeth Moutet, "L'Affaire Enderlin: Being a French journalist means never having to say you're sorry," appearing in the Weekly Standard (July 7/July 14, 2008): "When Jeanbar and Leconte took their time to ponder what they'd seen, Rosenzweig had the nerve to file a piece for Mena describing the tape's scenes of staging just before the fatal shooting. You could see Palestinians being carried on stretchers into ambulances, then coming out again unharmed, all in a kind of carnival atmosphere, with kids throwing stones and making faces at the camera, despite what was supposed to be a tense situation. The tape showed occasional gunshots, not continuous firing. From the general horsing around captured on film by Abu Rahme, Mena concluded that the whole scene must have been staged."

But it gets better. Mr. Enderlin had refused to release the whole tape of the al-Dura shooting, as he claimed he did not want to show the "unbearable agony" of the dying child, al-Dura. But it turns out the tape he held back not only showed the whole "killing" being staged, but also showed that there was no "agony" to conceal. It wasn't on the tape. There was no dying child and no agony of such child. Mr. Enderlin was just lying to manufacture an excuse for not releasing the whole tape.

And it gets better still. Consider the petition signed by those French journalists and celebrities. It called Mr. Karsenty's work, who carried on a lengthy effort to get the truth out, a "seven-year hate-filled smear campaign" aimed at destroying Enderlin's "professional dignity." It again claimed that al-Dura had been killed by the Israelis. It condemned the appellate court that had determined, after hearing evidence in excruciating detail, that the whole thing was a hoax. It expressed shock that the courts would allow "anyone, in the name of good faith and a supposed right to criticize and so-called freedom of speech, to smear with impunity the honor and reputation of news professionals."

The petition ignored all the evidence gathered in eight years by varied journalists, government bodies, and experts. The French journalists were content to let a hoax and a fraud live for eight years, and when it was conclusively proven to be a hoax, they were content to claim the fraud and hoax, despite the evidence, were true.

If all that's not bad enough, it gets worse for French journalism. The author of the Weekly Standard article called some of the signers of the petition, and their response was just as shocking and depressing as the rest of this story.

One signer, a 75-year-old journalist who was a Middle East expert, said he saw a dangerous American trend of "vindictive pressure groups interfering with news organizations ... Americans have been under the gun of such people for some time, but France used to be free of this kind of thing. [These groups] are paranoid, they're persistent, they never give up, they sap the energy of good reporters. I can't imagine how much money France 2 has spent defending this case. Charles Enderlin is an excellent journalist! I don't care if it's the Virgin Birth affair, I would tend to believe him. Someone like Charles simply doesn't make a story up."

Then when the author of the piece called to the signing journalist's attention to the fact that there was no "agony" of a dying al-Dura on the tape, the journalist responded, "Nonsense! Televisions don't show extreme violence. You know that."

This response was typical. The signing journalist was willing to ignore the facts, and defend his brother journalist whatever the truth indicated.

When a reporter from Le Figaro was asked why he signed the petition, he said, "These people, the ones attacking him, they're extreme rightists, yes? You can't take anything they say seriously." In other words, you can't believe anything the critics say, even if true.

There was one signer who didn't want to be identified, but at least had some semblance of honesty in describing what happened, "In all honesty, I think he edited his film on deadline and was careless, and afterwards he didn't want to admit he'd screwed up." So this journalist admitted the report was based on a "mistake," but still signed the petition in defense of the report. And the petition said what the signer knew to be false.

A star lawyer, who signed the petition when asked why the record should not be corrected, responded, "Surely not after so much time?" In other words, if the lie is accepted long enough, it should permanently be enshrined as truth. This same star lawyer, whose name was on the petition, then admitted he never read the petition. He said, "I'm not a journalist. I haven't even read this petition. I have macular retina degeneration I can no longer read."

Maybe that sums up French journalism. It is not visually blind, like that star lawyer who signed the petition, but it is certainly morally blind. And I regret to report that the mainstream media here in America has about the same moral vision as the French lawyer who signed the petition.

What shocked me most about this example of French journalism is that I never thought I'd see more dishonest, biased, and fraudulent journalism than I read every day in the New York Times, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and the rest of our mainstream media.

But reading the French al-Dura scenario, I became more convinced than ever that the great British historian, Paul Johnson, was right when he said that anti-Semitism and anti-Americanism are mental disorders. That explains what happened in France, and it explains what happens every day at 400 North Broad St. in Philadelphia and in the headquarters of mainstream media outlets across the U.S.

Herb Denenberg is a former Pennsylvania Insurance Commissioner, Pennsylvania Public Utility Commissioner, and professor at the Wharton School. He is a longtime Philadelphia journalist and consumer advocate. He is also a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of the Sciences. His column appears daily in The Bulletin. You can reach him at advocate@thebulletin.us.

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[editor]

An ‘Independent’ Al-Dura Commission in France?

By John Rosenthal
Pajamas Media
July 5, 2008

On Tuesday, France’s leading Jewish organization, the Representative Council of Jewish Institutions of France (CRIF), held a press conference in Paris to publicize its call for the establishment of an “independent investigative commission” on the al-Dura affair. The event was held at Paris’s posh Hilton Arc de Triomphe and in the presence of numerous representatives of the mainstream, or “institutional,” French media, including the state-sponsored Agence France-Presse (AFP) wire service. A camera crew from French public television France 2 filmed the entire proceedings. France 2 is the very television network whose contested September 2000 report allegedly showing the killing of the Palestinian boy Mohammed al-Dura would form the object of the commission. Further reflecting the excellent coordination between the CRIF and France’s established “media of reference,” on the same day the daily Le Figaro featured [1] a full-page article on the CRIF initiative and the al-Dura controversy more generally on page 2. A large blow-up of the iconic video frame showing Jamal al-Dura supposedly protecting his screaming child from Israeli fire covers nearly half the page.

The French media interest in the event stands in marked contrast to the “benign neglect” of the al-Dura controversy studiously practiced by the leading French news organizations up until now. Like the CRIF initiative itself, this sudden interest is undoubtedly a consequence of the unexpected turn taken in the affair in May, when a French appeals court overturned an earlier court’s condemnation of media critic Philippe Karsenty for having “defamed” France 2 and its longtime Middle East correspondent Charles Enderlin. As regular PJM readers will know, Karsenty is one of many critics who have called into question the authenticity of the al-Dura report. France 2 and Enderlin have in the meanwhile announced their intention to appeal the latest ruling in turn.

In opening the press conference, CRIF president Richard Prasquier alluded to the ongoing legal battle and summed up what he called the “position of the CRIF” as follows: “The position of the CRIF is very simple,” he said. “We are looking to establish the truth. … We are not for one party or the other.” In both substance and style, however, the rest of Prasquier’s remarks clearly belied this supposedly “simple” commitment to finding the truth and suggested rather a calculated initiative meant to serve essentially political ends: to achieve, so to say, a “negotiated settlement” of the al-Dura controversy. The most blatant giveaway of this political character of the CRIF initiative — blatant, at any rate, to anyone other than a member of the French establishment — was Prasquier’s proposal to have France 2 itself associated with the “independent” commission. Indeed, Prasquier proposed that France 2 should be the co-sponsor of the commission:

My wish is that this expert commission would be a joint decision of France 2 and us [i.e., apparently the CRIF] and that the decisions of this expert commission … the conclusions of this expert commission would be sufficiently contradictory and sufficiently valid to be accepted as what one can at this time most nearly identify with the truth of what happened.

The diplomatic tenor of Prasquier’s remarks is striking — to say nothing of the revealing slip from “conclusions” to “decisions.” The conclusions of the commission should be “sufficiently contradictory” — apparently meaning that they should take into account the viewpoints of all parties — that they can be “accepted” as approximating the reality: apparently meaning “accepted” as well by France 2. This last condition obviously rules out certain potential findings of the commission in advance: for example, that Enderlin and France 2 not only broadcast a fake report, but did so knowingly. Under duress, France 2 and Enderlin might be expected to “accept” the former conclusion, thus leaving the Palestinian cameraman Talal Abu Rahma as the fall guy in the entire affair. The latter conclusion, however, they could not “accept” under any circumstances without incurring not only an obvious knockout blow to their credibility, but indeed, as will be seen momentarily, potential criminal liability as well.

At times Prasquier sounded positively apologetic about even bringing up the issue. “A child was killed in Gaza,” he said, “probably by the Israelis, I have no idea.” The allusion was to the young boy whose body was turned over to a Palestinian hospital on the same day as the filming of the al-Dura episode.

The diplomatic pirouettes in Prasquier’s opening and closing remarks contrasted sharply with the nuts-and-bolts presentation of the al-Dura dossier by journalist Guy Mihaely that formed the centerpiece of the press conference. Mihaely is a contributor to the recently launched French website [2] Causeur: one of the rare entries in the “new” French media that seems genuinely determined to break with the habits and complicities that have come to define the old. With the aid of video and slides, Mihaely methodically walked the assembled reporters through the many grounds for concluding that there is, as he put it, an “intolerable gap” between the “narrative” of the al-Dura scene — viz. as provided by Charles Enderlin on September 30, 2000, and Enderlin, Rahma, and other representatives of France 2 on numerous occasions since — and what one actually sees in the images.

These points will be well known to those who have followed the affair via the “new” American media or to French speakers who have followed it via media “outsiders” like Karsenty or the Israel-based Metula News Agency. But they have thus far received virtually no hearing in the established French media. (As evidence of this continuing obliviousness, consider that Le Figaro chose to accompany the enormous still of Jamal and Mohammed al-Dura in its Tuesday edition with the following caption: “The report broadcast by France 2 on September 30, 2000, showed the death of the 12-year-old Mohammed, cut down by a burst of fire from an automatic weapon while in the arms of his father.”)

There is, for instance, the matter of the missing “death throes” of the boy, which Enderlin claimed on no less than three occasions to have cut from the raw footage, but which was nowhere to be found in the footage France 2 was finally compelled to turn over to the French court. Or the constant diminution in the amount of time Rahma filmed the scene: first 27 minutes according to a sworn statement, then 6 minutes according to his statements to German journalist Esther Schapira, and finally just 40 seconds in the footage France 2 provided to the court. Or the lack of visual evidence of the hail of gunfire to which the man and boy were supposed to have been exposed for some 45 minutes. Or the lack of any trace in the video of the terrible wounds that the man and boy were supposed to have suffered. Or the famous red cloth, which a blown-up frame of the video clearly reveals the child clutching in his hand, apparently to simulate blood. Or the revelation by the Israeli doctor Yehuda David that scars that Jamal al-Dura would later display to journalists as “proof” of the shooting were in fact the result of a much earlier incident and the surgery he performed on the man.

The evidence presented by Mihaely is so overwhelming that after hearing his presentation, one could well wonder why there is any need for an ostensibly “independent” investigative commission — other than to furnish a pretext perhaps for plausibly denying the obvious. The evidence of a conscious will to deceive is, moreover, patent in many of the examples: not only on the part of Rahma and Jamal al-Dura, but also on that of Enderlin and France 2. As Mihaely pointed out, whereas Charles Enderlin repeatedly claimed to have edited the scene of the boy’s “death throes” from the raw footage, [3] the only images of the boy and his father that he in fact cut are precisely those that show that the boy has not been killed at all: namely, those in which he calmly raises his arm from his face and then slowly roles over onto his stomach.

The role of France 2’s al-Dura report in the incitement of hatred against not only Israel and Israelis, but indeed against Jews around the world, has been well documented. Less than two weeks after the broadcast of the report, two Israeli soldiers would be lynched in Ramallah. Fall 2000 would see a massive spike in anti-Semitic violence in France: an “unsurprising” reaction to Israeli mistreatment of the Palestinians according to then-French Foreign Minister Hubert Védrine. And, of course, the same iconic image of Mohammed and Jamal al-Dura used in Tuesday’s edition of Le Figaro would repeatedly be shown in the Islamist propaganda video of the “confession” and then decapitation of Daniel Pearl.

If it should be established both that the al-Dura report was a fake and that Charles Enderlin and his colleagues knew or had strong reason to believe that it was fake, but broadcast it nonetheless, then this would clearly constitute a crime under [4] Article 24 of France’s law on press freedoms. Article 24 expressly prohibits the use of the press to “provoke discrimination or hatred or violence with respect to a person or a group of persons by virtue of their origin or their belonging or not belonging to an ethnic group, a nation, a race, or a particular religion.” Those violating this provision of the law are susceptible to a punishment of one year in prison or a fine of 45,000 euros or both.

If France is a country respectful of its own laws, the clarification of this issue would appear to be more properly a matter for the courts than for an “independent” commission.

John Rosenthal is translations editor and a contributing editor for World Politics Review. He blogs at Transatlantic Intelligencer.



URLs in this post:

[1] a full-page article
[2] Causeur
[3] the only images of the boy and his father that he in fact cut
[4] Article 24 of France’s law on press freedoms

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