...Since journalism likes to call itself "the first draft of history,” we call ourselves The Second Draft: Historians look at Journalism.

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?...

...Landes uses the outtakes and a frame by frame analysis to show, convincingly in my view, that much of it was entirely faked. My favorite is the footage of a group of fighters setting up an empty room into which they will later be firing, supposedly in combat with the Israeli checkpoint, then watching the a clip of the same footage, sans the setup, as news. My next favorite scene is viewing the dozen 120 mm main tank cannon 'hits' that were allegedly inflicted on a Palestinian hospital and watching the journalist sagely record what may safely be called evidence of his ballistic ignorance on his own film. Most of it is funny, some of it outrageously so, like the dead men who fall from biers in staged funerals and climb back on again...

...Watch Pallywood. You will laugh, but you may also cry.