Israelis Kill Palestinian Child--or do they? Pictures can lie.

Posted by Barry Lando at 7:19 AM on December 15, 2006.

I just received a fascinating video from a friend, Norbert Majerholc, a perfect demonstration of how deceptive television coverage can be. It's the record of how two of France's major TV channels reported the same tragic incident in a refugee camp in Nablus on October 27, 2004.

But, I suggest you read on before downloading the file.

For those who don't speak French, I've translated each report.

According to the first voice-over from France's FR 3:

"An Israeli vehicle enters the refugee camp of Balata in Nablus this morning. Officially they are taking part in a clean up operation to capture suspects. In the street, some young Palestinians begin to throw rocks in the direction of the Israeli army troops, who reply with real bullets. A Palestinian woman comes out of her house, screaming, her child in her arms. Her son has just been hit by a mortal bullet in the neck. Little Khaled was six years old."

That's how the report ends.

Must have been the Israelis who shot the kid, right?

Wrong. A cameraman for France's TF1, covered the same Israeli jeep as it entered the camp, but from a different angle:

Here's the TF1 voice-over report:

"At the corner of a narrow street a young Palestinian armed with a Kalashnikov waits for an opportunity. He shoots…one bullet. which ricochets off the armor of the jeep and goes through the window of a house 30 feet away. Khaled Walwil, six years old, falls, killed instantly."

Israeli soldier: "The terrorist’s Kalashnikov missed us because he didn’t have the time to take aim. The result is he killed an innocent child."

"TF 1: For once all the witnesses agree with the official Israeli version, including the Palestinian journalists who were at the scene."

O.K. Now take a look at the video, above.

How to explain the mix up?

Many viewing this sequence on a French site immediately concluded it proved an anti-Israel/anti-semitic--bias of the FR3 channel, and went on to claim that much of the coverage of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict is distorted in this fashion.

From my own experience in the TV game, that's not the way it happens. Not to say that reporters aren't biased, but usually incidents like this are the result not of any intent to distort the news. Instead, it's the result of a dfferent tactic that TV broadcasters use to mislead their public. Very often such voice over commentaries are done by reporters who were never at the scene they are describing.

For example, the FR 3 reporter who did the voice over the Nablus scenes was probably somewhere else when the incident took, and was later assigned to narrate the report over picture from a video casette that FR3 had obtained. Facing a deadline, she quickly writes a script based on whatever information she has available, hands the script to a tape editor, who then searches for pictures to illustrate her version of the event. Sometimes those versions are wrong. In this case, the reporter may simply have looked at the tape, thought it showed that the Israelis had accidentally killed the child and that was it.

This is not at all to argue that Israel's occupation of the West Bank and continued entry into Gaza is not, in the end, responsible for such tragic events.

Back in 1991, I reported on TV coverage of a much more deadly incident involving Israelis and Palestinians that originally played to Israel's advantage. On October 8, 1990, 17 Palestinians were shot dead by Israeli Border Police on the grounds of the Temple Mount in Jerusalem. The Israeli spokesmen--led by Benjamin Nethanyahu, then Foreign Minister-- claimed that the incident had been provoked by young Palestinians, rioting on the Temple Mount, and throwing huge stones over the ramparts, which hit Jews praying at the Wailing Wall below. The police had no option but to react and stormed the Temple Mount, killing the Palestinians.

There were plenty of cameramen covering the incidents but none of the network correspondents were actually at the site when the riots occurred. Instead, they cobbled their after action reports together based primarily on the Israeli version of events--not the Palestinain. Thus thereports broadcast round the world seemed to prove the Israeli charges.

A week later, I went to Jerusalem for a different story, but was impressed by the unanimous claims of Palestinians that the Israeli version wasnt the truth. The actual story was very complex but after examining video casettes that had been shot by all the major networks--including Israeli television itself--it became evident that it was the Palestinian version that was correct. In fact, when we checked all Jerusalem hospitals to find out if any Jewish worshippers had been injured by rocks at the Wailing Wall that day, we couldn't find a single case.

Again, what had happened was that the video tape editors at all the major networks had take the scripts the reporters handed them and searched for images to match the words. Up against a deadline, the editors themselves probably didnt realise how they were totally distorting the truth.

After our broadcast on 60 Minutes, we were deluged with outraged calls and letters from Jewish groups across the U.S., as well as attacks from the Israeli government.

It took six months before an Israeli commission confirmed that the version of events that we broadcast on 60 Minutes was the correct one.

One lesson is that broadcasters should make it crystal clear when the reporter narrating an incident was not at the scene--but they usually dont. Reporters who go along with such fiction are equally to blame.

Tagged as: tv, palestinian, israeli

Barry Lando, a former 60 Minutes producer, is the author of "Web of Deceit: The History of Western Complicity in Iraq from Churchill to Kennedy to George W. Bush." He also blogs at Barrylando.com.