I’ve not come across the Honest Reporting site before, but it apparently started at the time of Yom Kippur in 2000, when a group of Jewish students at British universities decided to do something to combat unfair reporting of the Intifada. In particular there was one photo distributed and published around the world of a “young man — bloodied and battered — crouching beneath a club-wielding Israeli policeman” that was published around the world as a Palestinian victim of Israel violence. In fact it showed an American Jewish student who had been beaten up by a mob of Palestinian Arabs, and the Israeli solders had rescued him and were protecting him from further mob violence.
As too often happens with the media, once the mistake had been pointed out, the corrections were half-hearted and many inaccuracies remained. The photograph is still used as anti-Israeli propoganda on various web sites – you can read more on HonestReporting.
A recent post on HonestReporting looks at the coverage by Reuters of a clash on the Israeli-Lebanese border during what was described by Israeli sources as a routine tree-pruning mission a couple of weeks ago. Their report makes clear the very unusual level of coverage from both the Israeli and Lebanese sides by Reuters photographers, who appear to have been given unusually wide and unrestricted access to the combat zone and have worked without injuries while Lebanese photographer, Assaf Abu Rahhal, working for the pro-Syrian paper al-Akhbar was killed and another, Ali Chouaib was injured.
As well as the five Reuters photographers, the agency also had other images from stringers; normally Reuters give the names of stringers but in this case unusually they are not identified. They too appear from their pictures to have had privileged access to the events.
Its worth reading the report in detail and looking at the pictures. The article raises a number of important questions about the integrity of Reuters and I hope they will issue a full explanation. Thanks to Jonathan Warren for posting a link to this feature on the London Photographers Branch Facebook page.
Another Israel-related photo story of the moment is Israeli soldiers posting images of themselves with Palestinian detainees on their Facebook pages. A story on Haaretz.com (brought to my attention on Facebook by Fil Kaler) reports the claim by Israeli human rights group ‘Breaking the Silence‘ that Israeli Defence Forces soldiers putting pictures showing themselves on Facebook “alongside handcuffed and blindfolded Palestinian detainees represent the norm, not the exception.” To back up their argument they themselves have published a few such more pictures on Facebook.