Team Journalist has spent the past several days rending their garments over the IDF’s airstrike against a building that housed AP and Al-Jazeera offices, conveniently downplaying the fact that said building was also a haven for Hamas terrorists.
GOP Sen. Tom Cotton recently had the gall to point that out:
"There’s plenty of evidence that some media outlets stationed in Gaza allow themselves to be used as pawns by Hamas."@TomCottonAR says the AP "turned a blind eye to terrorism and embraced a culture of silence on behalf of murderers who actively endangered its own reporters." pic.twitter.com/3J9dLZcvqK
— Washington Examiner (@dcexaminer) May 18, 2021
And that didn’t sit well with the anti-Israel, pro-Hamas contingent on Twitter. Or, as it happens, with Twitter themselves:
Let's be clear about what Cotton is arguing here, since there seems to be so much inexactitude on this subject in Twitter discourse (well, obviously). Alas, thread… pic.twitter.com/Di0HuR17Sq
— Jeff B. is *BOX OFFICE POISON* (@EsotericCD) May 18, 2021
Twitter’s framing of the controversy — which shouldn’t even be a controversy, if we’re being honest — was missing some important context and details. That left it up to people like attorney Jeff Blehar, aka @EsotericCD, to put Cotton’s remarks in perspective:
"Collusion" is the wrong term. "Compilicity" is correct. It is a well-known reality of foreign media coverage that when you base yourselves in a dictatorship then you are inevitably subject to the dictates of a regime that will boot you out (or worse) if you report anti-narrative
— Jeff B. is *BOX OFFICE POISON* (@EsotericCD) May 18, 2021
This goes doubly for terrorist regimes, as Hamas is. As far back as 2014, a former AP editor there pointed out Hamas was a hands-on manipulator of the AP: using their offices to station intel/fighters/offensive capabilities, and physically threatening reporters for bad coverage.
— Jeff B. is *BOX OFFICE POISON* (@EsotericCD) May 18, 2021
Here’s former AP reporter Matti Friedman’s 2014 piece.
The threat wasn't even implicit, it was rather explicit: don't give us the positive coverage we want, and we'll just expel you from Gaza altogether…or maybe something worse might happen to your employees.
— Jeff B. is *BOX OFFICE POISON* (@EsotericCD) May 18, 2021
Combine this with an ineluctable measure of ideological capture (how many of AP's "local correspondents" do you think were Team Hamas, huh?), and you get AP's extremely pro-Hamas slant in its reporting, as well as its acceptance of sharing space with them.
— Jeff B. is *BOX OFFICE POISON* (@EsotericCD) May 18, 2021
Someone at the top (who knows where or when) made the executive decision that ACCESS was more important than honesty in their reporting. Access is everything for foreign news bureaus. They sold out truth for access.
— Jeff B. is *BOX OFFICE POISON* (@EsotericCD) May 18, 2021
I'm old enough to remember that, right after the 2003 Iraq invasion, the head of CNN went to the New York Times to write a mea culpa op-Ed called "The News We Didn't Report," admitting that CNN had suppressed tons of negative stories about Saddam to retain its bureau in Baghdad.
— Jeff B. is *BOX OFFICE POISON* (@EsotericCD) May 18, 2021
Yep:
— Jaybird (@OG_Jaybird) May 18, 2021
This is a thing that happens. The AP knows it. And so do the rest of the media.
This is not some new phenomenon, and it's not a conspiracy theory. It is a structural fact of trying to set up news bureaus in unfree countries. AP is guilty of the same shameful actions as CNN was back in the day: lying and deflecting to gain and maintain power and access.
— Jeff B. is *BOX OFFICE POISON* (@EsotericCD) May 18, 2021
It is a business decision; it is not a moral or properly journalistic decision (except via extreme rationalization, the likes of which should make all non-deranged people scoff). It's about prestige and money. That is all.
Be wary.
— Jeff B. is *BOX OFFICE POISON* (@EsotericCD) May 18, 2021