Monday, December 14 2009

Hitting mid-December means it's time for some reporter to retrace the footsteps of Joseph and Mary Aleem Maqbool, Stephen Farrell, Matthew Price and Rory McCarthy from Nazareth to Bethlehem -- highlighting checkpoints, the security fence, and man on the street Palestinians.

Which papers still have an expense account for a trite Christmas road trip like this? Stay tuned . . .

Posted at 02:46 PM
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Thursday, December 10 2009

I'm looking at Google Analytics and trying to make some sense of the five most-viewed blog posts in 2009. 

1. Goldstone Report's Online
I merely posted a link to the UN's pdf report. I suppose people appreciated being told where to see the it for themselves. Most of the readers came from Google, so I attribute this to the headline.

2. Evolution of An Outrage
This was a 2003 post, tracing how Goya's painting, "Saturn Devouring One of His Children," became a nasty cartoon of Ariel Sharon eating a Palestinian child. Nearly all the traffic came from Google Images. Until I get a better handle on this, I'm calling this "accidental SEO."

3. Idiot's Guide to Navigating BBC Complaints
This was also a top 5 post last year. Doesn't say much about the Beeb, does it?

4. Liveblogging the Media War, Jan. 8
I'm gratified liveblogging made the top 5 even though traffic was mostly limited to that specific day. Liveblogging was intense, and my biggest regret is that I didn't start it up when the airstrikes began on Dec. 27.

5. Palestinian Journalists: Death Toll Inflated
The divergence between the Israeli and Palestinian casualty figures is one of the most important stories of 2009. I'm happy to see readers got this message. This was the first post on an issue I addressed several times over the course of the year.

Posted at 01:44 PM
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Wednesday, December 9 2009

See HonestReporting's latest media critiques:

• Isn't it time for UNRWA's chief to do some soul searching and look beyond blaming Israel? UNRWA: Perpetuating the Misery

• The Guardian cites disputed casualty figures as fact: The Guardian's Dodgy Death Toll

Posted at 01:01 PM
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Tuesday, December 8 2009

This snippet from the Daily Telegraph raises a lot questions about the UNRWA:

The UN Relief and Works Agency lists nearly 400,000 Palestinian refugees in Lebanon but the number actually resident in the country has dwindled to between 250,000 and 270,000 as many have moved abroad, according to Lebanese and Palestinian officials.

It's still a difficult situation, but how does the UNRWA justify fundraising based on what appears to be a severely inflated number of refugees? What else is the UNRWA not telling us?

Related reading: Anonymous Sources on Resettling Refugees

Posted at 11:09 AM
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Google announced that it's personalizing its search results for all internet users. Most reactions I've seen, Tech Inciter for example, focus on internet privacy issues.

As a media watchdog, my initial reaction was uncertainty for the search engine optimization of HonestReporting and other web activism sites.

But another response -- a comment posted by Tedster, at Webmaster World (via The Register) -- resonates with another important point in HR's in-house chatter:

There's something about always getting personalized search results that is socially troubling, too. I can see it creating a kind of ostrich phenomenon, where the average user is less and less exposed to anything new. I noticed this happening in my own online news consumption several years ago, and took intentional steps to make sure I got out of my own preferential areas.

Will we web activists find ourselves increasingly preaching to the online choir? Will we have a harder time breaking through to the rest of the world? Will Google's personalized search results essentially reinforce peoples' insular views?

Posted at 08:56 AM
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It's not often that the mainstream media reports on the stories of the hundreds of Victims of Palestinian terror. See HonestReporting Canada's latest communique: Exposing Excellence: Global National Profiles Israeli Victim of Terror

Posted at 08:52 AM
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Monday, December 7 2009

Hezbollah blurred the line between its so-called "military" and "media" wings this weekend, and probably placed Western correspondents at greater risk.

Mehdi Kanso, the group's intelligence chief, who took part in the 2006 abduction of IDF reservists Ehud Goldwasser and Eldad Regev was recently seen conducting surveillance of the Israeli-Lebanese border. Hezbollah's not supposed to operate near the border, so what did Kanso tell a UNIFIL patrol? According to Israeli media reports:

Kanso was apparently allowed into the border area with the equipment after telling UNIFIL troops that he was a reporter for Hizbullah's television station, Al-Manar.

This presents an interesting conundrum for the Committee to Protect Journalists. It's reasonable to expect the CPJ to denounce Kanso, whose stunt endangers journalists. But in 2006, the group idiotically denounced Israeli airstrikes on Al-Manar facilities, writing:

While Al-Manar may serve a propaganda function for Hezbollah, it does not appear based on a monitoring of its broadcasts today to be serving any discernible military function, according to CPJ’s analysis.

A Washington Times commentary I've referred to several times explains the flaw in the CPJ's logic:

But as the Treasury Department made clear, the issue is not al Manar's role as a television station but its role in facilitating the activities of Hezbollah, an organization that has killed more Americans than every other terrorist group save al Qaeda.

"Any entity maintained by a terrorist group -- whether masquerading as a charity, a business or a media outlet -- is as culpable as the terrorist group itself," said Treasury Undersecretary for Terrorism and Financial Intelligence Stuart Levey.

Related reading: Terrorist Television

Posted at 03:04 PM
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