Monday, September 19, 2005
Richard Landes writes at History News Network:
The Medievalist Who Is Watchdogging the Media
Our opening dossier – Pallywood – is an exercise in pointing out that the emperor is naked. Evidence we will make available to the cyber-public suggests that our news desks regularly receive staged scenes of fighting and injury filmed by Palestinian cameramen using Western equipment. Rather than delete them or fire the cameramen for gross violations of journalistic standards, editors cut the obviously fake parts and run a medley of plausible sight-bytes as real news.
If any graduate student in medieval history came with a draft that treated its sources as credulously as our media have done in this case, he or she would not make it through the first semester...
... What’s going on here? Is this a joke? Judging from the smiles of both the actors and the cameramen that follow successful “takes,” yes. And the joke is on us.
How long has Pallywood been going on? We cannot say, partly because, so far, the MSM will not re-examine their own rushes, nor let outsiders see them. But the material we have suggests a widespread and common practice that probably began in the 1980s and continues today.
Now, it is one thing for Palestinian journalists to behave in this manner. Many openly admit that the media represent a battlefield for them and they subordinate its values to their cause. But why would Western media clean up these fakes and present them as news?...
Update: Wretchard writes about The Second Draft:
...Watch Pallywood. You will laugh, but you may also cry.
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