Australian Broadcasting Commission's journalist Tim Palmer was part of a Jewish discussion list in 2002 for a few months. He was a newcomer to the ME and was interested to learn about Jews, Israel and how we as Australian Jews reacted to what was happening there at the time.
We were great "friends" at the beginning and we were going to meet up in Israel when I was going to introduce him to some of the local people,- but then suddenly, he became most unfriendly towards Israel and quite aggressive towards us who were arguing with him about it.
Tim Palmer was a raw-journalist in the ME area at first. Then he started to feel sorry only for the Palestinian people, many of whom were obviously caught in the crossfire in the political as well as the actual physical sense! One could not blame him after all,- having no affinity for Israeli Jews, being ignorant in the main about the past, why should he care more about the 'mighty' Israelis than about the 'poor' Arabs? He seemed to be like most reporters,- more of an intuitive journalist reacting to the moment than an analytical, objective one.
This is the Zionists' PR problem and the image difficulties which Israel faces! When one sees on the spot how some people are suffering, one's heart goes out to them without stopping to apportion accurate rather than instant blame. Most of the journalists live in comfort in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, but report from Gaza and the West Bank! The preventive measures taken by Israel to save its citizens are not lauded and newsworthy, but used against them to prove that they are not the victims,- only the other side is!
Then Tim went to Indonesia. Would he have become more or less pro-Islamic-terrorists since then, I wonder?
But I don't think that his next local assignment, producing the ABC's 'Media Watch' (a 15 minute program picking mainly local media items to pieces for inaccuracies) will affect us or the media's reporting about the ME,- or will it?
MM
------------------------------------------------------------
http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/story/0,20867,20999566-2702,00.html
Free rein for media monitor
Imre Salusinszky
January 02, 2007
YEARS spent dodging bullets as a correspondent in the Middle East and
southeast Asia might -- just might -- prepare Tim Palmer for life in
charge of ABC television's Media Watch.
Palmer has been confirmed as the executive producer of a show that
causes much angst in newsrooms around the country.
"A lot of the time the program doesn't generate all that much heat," he
told The Australian , optimistically.
-----------------------snip.--
No comments:
Post a Comment