From: David Frankfurter - http://dfrankfurter.livejournal.com
Dear friends,
The blogosphere expressed a level of surprise when Reuters was caught
falsifying and staging photos, seeming to completely integrate into the
Hezballywod propaganda machine.
I have been loading my archive history, and came across Reuters complicity
in anti-Israel propaganda early in 2001. See
http://dfrankfurter.livejournal.com/2001/02/21 - exposing staged
photography by Reuters journalist Suhaib Salem, with a blatantly misleading
caption. And a Google search on the man stumbled over the following piece
from the Wall Street Journal of a year and a half later.
Wonder what motivates Reuters?
Monday, June 3, 2002 2:40 p.m. EDT
http://www.opinionjournal.com/best/?id=110001794
http://webcenter.newssearch.netscape.com/aolns_display.adp?key=200206011025
000144020_aolns.src Family Ties--I
Remember Suhaib Salem? He's the Reuters photographer whom Israel arrested in
Gaza on May 22 on suspicion of terrorism--the Israelis claimed, and he
denied, that he had a grenade in his possession--then released last week.
The Associated Press reports that Salem's brother Salah was "one of the men
involved in the kidnapping and killing of Israeli soldier Cpl. Nachson
Waxman in 1994. Both Salah Salem and Waxman were killed when the Israelis
attempted to rescue Waxman." Reuters doesn't seem to have mentioned Salah
Salem in its coverage of his brother's arrest.
Suhaib Salem, of course, is not responsible for his brother's actions, and
we know of no reason to doubt he's fine journalist. (Here's a
http://reuters.com/photo_gallery_pres.jhtml?imageID=1000165513 sample of
his work, a shot of an unnamed Palestinian man enjoying a tender moment with
the founder of the terror group Hamas.) But isn't there an obvious conflict
of interest in assigning the brother of a Palestinian terrorist--or, in
Reutervillian parlance, of "another man's freedom fighter"--to cover the
Israeli-Arab conflict?
The AP reports that when Salem was arrested, he was on his way to Japan to
cover the World Cup, a soccer tournament. If the folks at Reuters are really
in the business of news rather than propaganda, they ought to let Salem stay
in Japan, or else reassign him to cover some other part of the world where
there would be no obvious reason to question his objectivity.
A second Reuters staffer, TV cameraman Jussry al-Jamal, remains in Israeli
custody, the AP reports.
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