By Alyssa A. Lappen
AmericanThinker.com | March 11, 2006

In The Other War: Israelis, Palestinians and the Struggle for Media Supremacy, veteran journalist Stephanie Gutmann provides careful documentation of the myriad ways in which the mainstream media coverage of the Middle East has been grossly compromised. Gutmann spent part of her teenage years in Israel and the disputed territories with her psychologist father, who studies ‘cross-cultural features of aging.’ On her return to the U.S., she was hardly a Zionist. On the contrary, throughout her college years in Ann Arbor, and later, she hung out with the solidly anti-Israel ‘left.’

But in September 2000 when the current war against Israel began, Gutmann found herself glued to her television, and increasingly disturbed by the inaccurate portrayal of Israel as the next Tiananmen Square, where ‘Large Mechanized Brutes’ converged on ‘Small Vulnerable Brown People.’ Even in her leftist experiences, Israel was simply not a country that ‘would countenance regular, systematic brutality against civilians, [or] produce soldiers capable of doing such a thing.’

Thus in October 2000, she followed the ‘great herd of foreign press’ and freelancers that decamped to Jerusalem to cover some action and pad their bank accounts. She found the press, then and during a return trip in 2002, almost universally pro—Palestinian and anti—Israel. Many foreign reporters, who habitually hang out in the American Colony Hotel, ‘on the other side of the Green Line, in East Jerusalem,’ cheerily announced this fact. Of course, this attitude does not make for unbiased, complete or factual news. But in general, whatever Palestinian officials say, reporters in Israel accept as unmitigated truth, without question or challenge. And whatever Israeli officials say, the same reporters consider suspect propaganda. The press rarely if ever applies equal skepticism to both sides. Continue reading “The Other War” →

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