I Wish I Had An LA Times Subscription, So I Could Cancel It
Fisking the LA Times on Israel is kind of unfair, but Laura King's article from this morning is just absurd. Of course, it's rare that the LA Times will print outright lies (of course, it’s not like they’re above even that journalistic faux pas – what they are above is actually printing the corrections afterwards). Rather, what you usually get are the journalistic tricks of selective omissions to imply falsehoods and of particular phrasing and descriptions in order to set an unbalanced tone. So lets see what the most anti-Israel paper in the country has for us this morning.
JERUSALEM — Angry Jewish settlers scuffled Tuesday with hundreds of Israeli troops who arrived to dismantle a makeshift wooden synagogue outside a settlement in the West Bank, providing a preview of the resistance Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's government is likely to face if it tries to uproot more illegal offshoots of settlements.
Whether or not there will be forcible resistance to Sharon's coming evacuations is up in the air - it is one of the central political dramas in Israel right now. However, King really wants to paint a picture of crazed fundamentalists - so she’s wiling to overlook such nuances as the fact that the scuffle was not about evacuating settlements, but about the spectacle of Jews destroying a synagogue. It was the religious implications that made the situation so explosive. Remember - omission and tone. In fact, none of the mobile homes were even touched during the demolition – the entire scuffle was only about the synagogue.
The dismantling of dozens of Jewish settlement outposts is required under the initial phase of the U.S.-backed "road map" — a peace blueprint that has largely fallen into disuse in recent months amid a seeming deadlock between Israel and Palestinians.
Technically true, but completely and totally irrelevant. Yes, the road map requires the dismantling of settlements. No, that does not have anything to do either with this evacuation or (crucially) the coming uprooting of settlements that she had talked about in the paragraph just above and that are somehow supposed to be connected to this (if we assume that the paragraphs are related to each other). The upcoming evacuations are of course being taken unilaterally and not in the context of the Road Map at all, but God forbid that the LA Times acknowledge that Ariel Sharon might be somehow interested in giving up even an inch of the West Bank. This is really kind of outrageous - it's an entirely irrelevant paragraph (and the second paragraph at that) placed there only to begin casting the Israelis as essentially warmongers who must be forcibly brought to the peace table.
Very few of these settlement offshoots have been removed, and in some cases — after the Israeli army stepped in to haul away a few rusty trailers or tear down a rickety water tower — the fledgling communities, which are tentacles of long-established West Bank settlements, merely migrated to other hilltops nearby.
This one I'm not sure what to do with. A rhetorical analysis immediately suggests itself - "hauling" (like garbage), "rusty trailers" and "rickety water tower" (because they're primitive religious zealots), "tentacles" (because Jews are slimy and will worm their way into every crevice). But I'll just focus on a single, very interesting inversion - what exactly do you imagine went into choosing the placement of "settlement" and "community"? I think that this is a naked instance of intentional bias - I don’t assume that King came up with these two words off the top of her head, but after pulling out a thesaurus and finding both of them, why do you think she made the choices she made? The outpost, which had 10 mobile homes, she labels a "community." OK, maybe they are. But then in the next sentence she contrasts that "community" with the "settlements" that the outpost residents came from. Those settlements, of course, include Ariel, which is a full-fledged city with 40,000 people. What’s the point of this compare and contrast? It's patently meant to delegitimze any Jewish presence in the West Bank, even well- established ones. Usually it's much more difficult to demonstrate how King’s subtle biasing works in a newspaper article - you have to trace the pejorative adjectives and resonances attached to settlements, and the author can disavow those connotations. But this case is transparent - King clearly selected a word with positive connotations for the outpost which she consistently denigrated above and below this paragraph as merely temporary, but she choose a word with negative connotations for the permanent city from which the residents came. Why didn’t she just choose words with negative valence for both? Maybe she was using a pocket dictionary…
The next two paragraphs are about Lebanon:
Meanwhile, Israeli jets roared over Lebanon, striking what were described as strongholds of the militant group Hezbollah in the eastern Bekaa Valley — the first such reprisal raids by Israel in more than five months. No casualties were reported.
It's a minor thing, but this Reuters trick of inserting the caveat "as described by Israel" in front of anything that might possibly reflect favorably upon Israel is getting a little old (Reuters pretty much made this trick famous by using phrases like "Israeli-described victim" to describe babies killed by suicide bombers). And you can rest assured that what Israel struck were in fact (not just described as) terrorist bases - if they had been civilian installations, not only would the LA Times be screaming about it off of the front page, but they certainly would not be writing phrases like "what Lebanon described as civilian villages."
The airstrikes in eastern Lebanon came even as Israeli military officials acknowledged that an army bulldozer clearing mines along the Israeli-Lebanese border a day earlier had strayed at least slightly into Lebanon before Hezbollah fighters fired on it, killing an Israeli soldier and wounding a second.
Because you see, if an Israeli bulldozer clearing mines put in the ground by Hezbollah in order to kill Israeli soldiers makes a wide U-Turn in order to get around the mine, the LA Times will (a) fail to mention that part of the story and (b) imply that said wide U-Turn justified Hezbollah's unprovoked attack.
OK, no logical transition (she clearly wasn’t attending writing classes while she was ditching her journalism classes), and we’re back in the West Bank:
In the West Bank, the Israeli army move[d] to dismantle a crudely built synagogue in the settlement outpost of West Tapuah, north of Jerusalem... One soldier was shoved off the roof of the hut-like structure, which was erected by followers of the late militant Rabbi Meir Kahane.
For those of you keeping count at home, there have been exactly 3 paragraphs describing the synagogue (out of 4 total paragraphs about the bulldozing). So far we don’t know much about what led up to the evacuation or what it’s implications will be, but we do know that the synagogue was "makeshift," "wooden," "crudely built", and "hut-like" and built next to other "rusty" and "rickety" buildings. I was suspicious before, but now I'm definitely convinced that she had a thesaurus next to her. Nobody who is this bad a journalist and writer could have a vocabulary that extensive. Although on the other hand, these aren’t particularly large words.
About 20 settlers were arrested, authorities said. One was a woman whom Israeli TV film footage showed repeatedly biting a soldier.
Primitive savages. "Followers" of some dead rabbi (I mean, I'll admit that Rabbi Kahane was kind of questionable, but still, it's not like she knows why...) OK, now follow the next part closely - this is where things get interesting and we find out that she’s not just a careless journalist, but is actively dishonest:
Many of about 150 settlers who defied the army represented the most extreme branches of the settler movement, which say they will never abide by territorial concessions by the Sharon government as part of a peace accord with the Palestinians.
"We'll continue to build — we'll build another synagogue on another hill and another outpost," settler activist Itamar Ben-Gevir told Israel Radio after the confrontation. The army removed all religious artifacts from the site before dismantling the synagogue, a military spokesman said.
Three things: one, the quote that she offers as evidence in no way supports her conclusion that even these extreme settlers won't abide any territorial concessions - it just doesn't; two, a new torah being used in a synagogue is not an “artifact” (Webster’s: n. "applied esp. to the simpler products of aboriginal art" - she needs to get over this settlers are primitive motif she’s got going); third (and this is the bad one), she clearly knows, contrary to her opening paragraph, that this scuffle was over the religious significance of the synagogue, and not of the outpost as such (that’s why she tries to be snide and point out that the settlers were overreacting because all the religious artifacts had been removed (as if the synagogue itself is not of religious significance). She just works so hard to paint the residents as irrational and primitive that she forgets herself! OK, cut back to the Lebanon thing (I told you, she's not so much on the English classes).
Syrian President Bashar Assad's recent calls for a renewal of negotiations have been coolly received by Israeli officials.
Although some of those close to Sharon — and many politicians in Israel's leftist opposition — think no opportunity to make peace with a bitter enemy should be passed up, the Sharon camp holds that no serious negotiations are possible until and unless Syria withholds its support for Hezbollah, a radical Shiite Muslim group that is sworn to Israel's destruction.
Flatly false. The sticking point is over starting the negotiations with or without preconditions: see here and here. Everything else is just confidence building (i.e. it would be nice, as a sign that Syria is ready to make peace with Israel, if they would stop giving Hezbollah orders to kill Israelis).
Israeli news reports said senior military officials weighed a warning strike at Syria itself, but decided to confine themselves to hitting at known Hezbollah bases in the Bekaa Valley.
Incoherent. It’s not a "warning strike" if it’s response to Syria’s responsibility for Israeli deathes. That’s called retaliation (maybe she turned to the wrong part of her thesaurus? I dunno...) This paragraph is just made to make Israelis sound militaristic.
But this paragraph is more important under the "proof of intentional bias" category. In this paragraph, what used to be known as "Israeli described" strongholds suddenly become "known Hezbollah bases". Before I discuss the implication of this, lets get to the next paragraph.
Despite the acknowledgment that their mine-clearing bulldozer had intruded into Lebanese territory, Israeli officials said Hezbollah bore the responsibility for the violence for laying the explosives.
And here is the acknowledgement I asked for earlier that Hezbollah was responsible for laying the mines. Admittedly, it is offset by that annoying "Israeli officials said" Reuters trick again (it's not like anyone is denying< that Hezbollah put those mines down, why the caveat?) - but you take what you can get.
The article then switches to Gaza. So why, in the last paragraphs about Lebanon, is there finally a presentation of all the crucial facts that are necessary to understand what's really going on? More to the point – what is the implication of the fact that fleshing out the situation contradicts the implications made earlier in the article? The clue is given by the fact that there are essentially four sections to the article - Settlements, Lebanon, Settlements, and Lebanon. The last two sections are essentially just reprints of the first two, without any appreciable analytical additions.
But they do serve a crucial journalistic function – they allow King to protect herself from charges of bias or omission? Her response to my initial complaints would be that all of those facts are included at the end of the article. But the end of the article could easily have been incorporated into the beginning of the article. By not including them there, she risks obfuscating the situation in order to set the tone and direction of the piece - and thus it’s final impact - against Israel.
JERUSALEM — Angry Jewish settlers scuffled Tuesday with hundreds of Israeli troops who arrived to dismantle a makeshift wooden synagogue outside a settlement in the West Bank, providing a preview of the resistance Prime Minister Ariel Sharon's government is likely to face if it tries to uproot more illegal offshoots of settlements.
Whether or not there will be forcible resistance to Sharon's coming evacuations is up in the air - it is one of the central political dramas in Israel right now. However, King really wants to paint a picture of crazed fundamentalists - so she’s wiling to overlook such nuances as the fact that the scuffle was not about evacuating settlements, but about the spectacle of Jews destroying a synagogue. It was the religious implications that made the situation so explosive. Remember - omission and tone. In fact, none of the mobile homes were even touched during the demolition – the entire scuffle was only about the synagogue.
The dismantling of dozens of Jewish settlement outposts is required under the initial phase of the U.S.-backed "road map" — a peace blueprint that has largely fallen into disuse in recent months amid a seeming deadlock between Israel and Palestinians.
Technically true, but completely and totally irrelevant. Yes, the road map requires the dismantling of settlements. No, that does not have anything to do either with this evacuation or (crucially) the coming uprooting of settlements that she had talked about in the paragraph just above and that are somehow supposed to be connected to this (if we assume that the paragraphs are related to each other). The upcoming evacuations are of course being taken unilaterally and not in the context of the Road Map at all, but God forbid that the LA Times acknowledge that Ariel Sharon might be somehow interested in giving up even an inch of the West Bank. This is really kind of outrageous - it's an entirely irrelevant paragraph (and the second paragraph at that) placed there only to begin casting the Israelis as essentially warmongers who must be forcibly brought to the peace table.
Very few of these settlement offshoots have been removed, and in some cases — after the Israeli army stepped in to haul away a few rusty trailers or tear down a rickety water tower — the fledgling communities, which are tentacles of long-established West Bank settlements, merely migrated to other hilltops nearby.
This one I'm not sure what to do with. A rhetorical analysis immediately suggests itself - "hauling" (like garbage), "rusty trailers" and "rickety water tower" (because they're primitive religious zealots), "tentacles" (because Jews are slimy and will worm their way into every crevice). But I'll just focus on a single, very interesting inversion - what exactly do you imagine went into choosing the placement of "settlement" and "community"? I think that this is a naked instance of intentional bias - I don’t assume that King came up with these two words off the top of her head, but after pulling out a thesaurus and finding both of them, why do you think she made the choices she made? The outpost, which had 10 mobile homes, she labels a "community." OK, maybe they are. But then in the next sentence she contrasts that "community" with the "settlements" that the outpost residents came from. Those settlements, of course, include Ariel, which is a full-fledged city with 40,000 people. What’s the point of this compare and contrast? It's patently meant to delegitimze any Jewish presence in the West Bank, even well- established ones. Usually it's much more difficult to demonstrate how King’s subtle biasing works in a newspaper article - you have to trace the pejorative adjectives and resonances attached to settlements, and the author can disavow those connotations. But this case is transparent - King clearly selected a word with positive connotations for the outpost which she consistently denigrated above and below this paragraph as merely temporary, but she choose a word with negative connotations for the permanent city from which the residents came. Why didn’t she just choose words with negative valence for both? Maybe she was using a pocket dictionary…
The next two paragraphs are about Lebanon:
Meanwhile, Israeli jets roared over Lebanon, striking what were described as strongholds of the militant group Hezbollah in the eastern Bekaa Valley — the first such reprisal raids by Israel in more than five months. No casualties were reported.
It's a minor thing, but this Reuters trick of inserting the caveat "as described by Israel" in front of anything that might possibly reflect favorably upon Israel is getting a little old (Reuters pretty much made this trick famous by using phrases like "Israeli-described victim" to describe babies killed by suicide bombers). And you can rest assured that what Israel struck were in fact (not just described as) terrorist bases - if they had been civilian installations, not only would the LA Times be screaming about it off of the front page, but they certainly would not be writing phrases like "what Lebanon described as civilian villages."
The airstrikes in eastern Lebanon came even as Israeli military officials acknowledged that an army bulldozer clearing mines along the Israeli-Lebanese border a day earlier had strayed at least slightly into Lebanon before Hezbollah fighters fired on it, killing an Israeli soldier and wounding a second.
Because you see, if an Israeli bulldozer clearing mines put in the ground by Hezbollah in order to kill Israeli soldiers makes a wide U-Turn in order to get around the mine, the LA Times will (a) fail to mention that part of the story and (b) imply that said wide U-Turn justified Hezbollah's unprovoked attack.
OK, no logical transition (she clearly wasn’t attending writing classes while she was ditching her journalism classes), and we’re back in the West Bank:
In the West Bank, the Israeli army move[d] to dismantle a crudely built synagogue in the settlement outpost of West Tapuah, north of Jerusalem... One soldier was shoved off the roof of the hut-like structure, which was erected by followers of the late militant Rabbi Meir Kahane.
For those of you keeping count at home, there have been exactly 3 paragraphs describing the synagogue (out of 4 total paragraphs about the bulldozing). So far we don’t know much about what led up to the evacuation or what it’s implications will be, but we do know that the synagogue was "makeshift," "wooden," "crudely built", and "hut-like" and built next to other "rusty" and "rickety" buildings. I was suspicious before, but now I'm definitely convinced that she had a thesaurus next to her. Nobody who is this bad a journalist and writer could have a vocabulary that extensive. Although on the other hand, these aren’t particularly large words.
About 20 settlers were arrested, authorities said. One was a woman whom Israeli TV film footage showed repeatedly biting a soldier.
Primitive savages. "Followers" of some dead rabbi (I mean, I'll admit that Rabbi Kahane was kind of questionable, but still, it's not like she knows why...) OK, now follow the next part closely - this is where things get interesting and we find out that she’s not just a careless journalist, but is actively dishonest:
Many of about 150 settlers who defied the army represented the most extreme branches of the settler movement, which say they will never abide by territorial concessions by the Sharon government as part of a peace accord with the Palestinians.
"We'll continue to build — we'll build another synagogue on another hill and another outpost," settler activist Itamar Ben-Gevir told Israel Radio after the confrontation. The army removed all religious artifacts from the site before dismantling the synagogue, a military spokesman said.
Three things: one, the quote that she offers as evidence in no way supports her conclusion that even these extreme settlers won't abide any territorial concessions - it just doesn't; two, a new torah being used in a synagogue is not an “artifact” (Webster’s: n. "applied esp. to the simpler products of aboriginal art" - she needs to get over this settlers are primitive motif she’s got going); third (and this is the bad one), she clearly knows, contrary to her opening paragraph, that this scuffle was over the religious significance of the synagogue, and not of the outpost as such (that’s why she tries to be snide and point out that the settlers were overreacting because all the religious artifacts had been removed (as if the synagogue itself is not of religious significance). She just works so hard to paint the residents as irrational and primitive that she forgets herself! OK, cut back to the Lebanon thing (I told you, she's not so much on the English classes).
Syrian President Bashar Assad's recent calls for a renewal of negotiations have been coolly received by Israeli officials.
Although some of those close to Sharon — and many politicians in Israel's leftist opposition — think no opportunity to make peace with a bitter enemy should be passed up, the Sharon camp holds that no serious negotiations are possible until and unless Syria withholds its support for Hezbollah, a radical Shiite Muslim group that is sworn to Israel's destruction.
Flatly false. The sticking point is over starting the negotiations with or without preconditions: see here and here. Everything else is just confidence building (i.e. it would be nice, as a sign that Syria is ready to make peace with Israel, if they would stop giving Hezbollah orders to kill Israelis).
Israeli news reports said senior military officials weighed a warning strike at Syria itself, but decided to confine themselves to hitting at known Hezbollah bases in the Bekaa Valley.
Incoherent. It’s not a "warning strike" if it’s response to Syria’s responsibility for Israeli deathes. That’s called retaliation (maybe she turned to the wrong part of her thesaurus? I dunno...) This paragraph is just made to make Israelis sound militaristic.
But this paragraph is more important under the "proof of intentional bias" category. In this paragraph, what used to be known as "Israeli described" strongholds suddenly become "known Hezbollah bases". Before I discuss the implication of this, lets get to the next paragraph.
Despite the acknowledgment that their mine-clearing bulldozer had intruded into Lebanese territory, Israeli officials said Hezbollah bore the responsibility for the violence for laying the explosives.
And here is the acknowledgement I asked for earlier that Hezbollah was responsible for laying the mines. Admittedly, it is offset by that annoying "Israeli officials said" Reuters trick again (it's not like anyone is denying< that Hezbollah put those mines down, why the caveat?) - but you take what you can get.
The article then switches to Gaza. So why, in the last paragraphs about Lebanon, is there finally a presentation of all the crucial facts that are necessary to understand what's really going on? More to the point – what is the implication of the fact that fleshing out the situation contradicts the implications made earlier in the article? The clue is given by the fact that there are essentially four sections to the article - Settlements, Lebanon, Settlements, and Lebanon. The last two sections are essentially just reprints of the first two, without any appreciable analytical additions.
But they do serve a crucial journalistic function – they allow King to protect herself from charges of bias or omission? Her response to my initial complaints would be that all of those facts are included at the end of the article. But the end of the article could easily have been incorporated into the beginning of the article. By not including them there, she risks obfuscating the situation in order to set the tone and direction of the piece - and thus it’s final impact - against Israel.
