A Year of Dishonest Reporting — Why The Guardian Won
December 13, 2011 10:24 by Pesach Benson
It was a landslide.
HonestReporting readers were asked to choose this year’s Dishonest Reporting Award, and they spoke out — with a vengeance we haven’t seen for nominations in previous years. Read about the winners in ten other categories on the Dishonest Reporting Awards main page.
In comments on our web site, our Facebook community, 
and in emails, accusations of anti-Semitism turned the heat up on an annual discussion normally about imbalanced stories, spin games, and journalistic naivete.
“The Guardian, for sure.”
“Nobody comes even close to their level of plain antisemitism.”
“. . . they seem to have a consistent system of bashing Israel. ”
“Al-Guardian has to win; it’s almost impossible to be more biased than it is.”
The Guardian’s skewed news and commentary have a wide reach. In May alone, its web site drew in 50 million unique readers.
This paper systematically dislikes Israel. The sheer volume of The Guardian’s deliberately vicious output in 2011 necessitated a top 10 list of reasons it deserves the 2011 Dishonest Reporting Award.
Top 10 Reasons The Guardian Won the Dishonest Reporting Award
1. An Anti-Semitic Response to Gilad Shalit Swap
Deborah Orr
Responding to the Gilad Shalit prisoner swap, Deborah Orr said the disproportionate number of freed Palestinians for one soldier reflected the Jewish state’s “obscene idea that Israeli lives are more important than Palestinian lives,” and that “the lives of the chosen are of hugely greater consequence than those of their unfortunate neighbours.”
Never mind that the disproportionate nature of the exchange was at the insistence of Hamas, or the fact that choseness actually refers to responsibility, not superiority.
HonestReporting was copied in on more than 500 complaints to The Guardian. The result?
Orr made a mealy-mouthed apology, but readers’ editor Chris Elliott acknowledged the presence of anti-Semitism in The Guardian, but didn’t directly judge Orr. Elliott appeared more concerned about the effects of anti-Semitism on the paper’s reputation than about the anti-Semitism itself.
When any paper’s public editor acknowledges anti-Semitism, that should raise red flags.
2. PaliLeaks
PLO documents on a decade of peace talks (The Palestine Papers, a.k.a. PaliLeaks) were leaked to The Guardian and Al-Jazeera. But the revelations — that Israel was actually serious about peace — sorely disappointed the editors.
In response, the editorial team displayed their objective detachment with a staff editorial that was “more Palestinian than the Palestinians.”
In The Guardian’s own words, PA negotiators were “craven” bootlickers who “conspire to build a puppet state in Palestine, at best authoritarian, at worst a surrogate for an occupying force.”
The Guardian also gave an op-ed platform to the Hamas chief of international relations, Osama Hamdan (more on the issue of giving an editorial soapbox to terror below) and published a controversial letter by Ted Honderich which legitimized and justified Palestinian terror. That letter sparked such outrage, readers’ editor Chris Elliott was compelled to weigh in — ultimately defending the decision to publish it.
Furthermore, the paper issued a correction for a quote box attributed to Tzipi Livni after editors conceded that the former foreign minister’s quote “was cut in a way that may have given a misleading impression.”
Overall, David Landau, Haaretz’s former chief editor, hit the nail on the head when he described The Guardian’s PaliLeaks presentation as “intended to poison the Palestinians against their leaders.”
3. Soapbox for Terror
Musa Abu Marzuq
Palestinian reconciliation efforts were on and off (mostly off) throughout the year. At one point, The Guardian gave Hamas spinmeister Musa Abu Marzuq the legitimacy of an op-ed soapbox.
Israel Law Center director Nitsana Darshan-Leitner told HonestReporting that newspapers which give terror groups like Hamas prominent op-ed bylines are skating on very thin legal ice. The op-ed is free publicity, which facilitates the terror organization’s PR:
Legally speaking, it would seem that there is not much difference between outlaw regimes like Iran and Syria, which illegally provide material support and resources to terrorist organizations, and liberal media outlets which provide millions of dollars in free advertising and access to groups like Hamas when they publish their leaders’ dangerous messages.
As mentioned above, The Guardian also gave a soapbox to to Osama Hamdan who discussed the Hamas response to the PaliLeaks affair.
4. Fishing for A Story
Correspondent Harriet Sherwood spent a day in July reporting and tweeting from a Gaza fishing boat testing the Israeli navy’s enforcement of a three-mile limit.
None of Sherwood’s 46 tweets acknowledged maritime arms smuggling as the reason for the naval restrictions. Four months before the jolly jaunt, the Israeli navy intercepted the Victoria, which was carrying anti-ship missiles, mortar shells, radar systems, and more.
Considering that Sherwood’s ditzy 2011 journalism included a claim that the Knesset is built on the ancestral farmland of the abandoned Palestinian village of Lifta (we debunked that false claim), and an airheaded look at an abandoned airplane (resolved by a reader’s biting comment), be thankful The Guardian left the Victoria story for AP.
5. Goldstone Recants
Judge Richard Goldstone
In a Washington Post op-ed, Judge Richard Goldstone backtracked on the UN report into Operation Cast Lead which he headed. His mea culpa specifically stated, “civilians were not intentionally targeted as a matter of policy” and accepted that the casualty figures were not as high as his report indicated.
The Guardian reacted with an arrogant, intellectually dishonest staff editorial denying that the Goldstone report ever accused Israel of deliberately attacking civilians in the first place.
As for the casualty numbers, the paper insisted on using the inflated casualty figures Goldstone disavowed — without explaining why. HonestReporting took apart that editorial in more depth.
6. Jawaher Abu Rahma
Palestinians claimed that Jawaher Abu Rahma died of tear gas inhalation at a demonstration in Bil’in.
Harriet Sherwood’s coverage compared Abu Rahma to Mohammed al-Dura, the 12 year-old Palestinian whose video (itself debunked) elevated the boy to iconic martyr status. Her report was also accompanied by Abu Rahma’s Red Crescent emergency case form, a CT scan and hospital report.
Lay readers can’t be expected to understand the meaning of these reports, but they did serve The Guardian’s purpose: disingenuously blaming Israel.
- The Palestinian medical report indicated no clear cause of death.
- Statements about tear gas inhalation were based on the family’s claims, not on any empirical determination.
- No post-mortem was performed.
In fact, an IDF investigation found that Abu Rahma died because of Palestinian medical malpractice.
Reporter Ana Carbajosa published a Jan. 9 puff piece interview with Abu Rahma’s mother giving further credibility to the Palestinian accusations.
7. A Bizarre Harangue
Jerusalem correspondent Harriet Sherwood displayed some of the groupthink we long suspected goes on at The Guardian with one unusually long and shrill telephone conversation in May.
The topic: Vittorio Arrigoni, a member of the International Solidarity Movement in Gaza who was kidnapped and murdered by Palestinian Salafists. Was it fair to label Arrigoni as an “activist?” There was a lot of debate. After the Jewish Chronicle published one forceful commentary, JC editor Stephen Pollard received a phone call from a very irate Sherwood.
She’s entitled to her views, but what Pollard described was a shocking inability to “agree to disagree.”
I pointed out again that I don’t agree with all the columns in the JC.
This came as a big shock to her: ‘But you’re defending your printing of the piece!’
‘Of course I am. I edit the paper.’ I replied.
There’s more, but you get the full drift.
Utterly bizarre. Or maybe not, given what she writes in the Guardian.
Harriet Sherwood and Stephen Pollard
8. The Palmer Report on the Mavi Marmara
When the UN’s Palmer report vindicated the legality of Israel’s Gaza blockade, a Guardian staff-editorial rebuked the inquiry simply because the findings contradicted an array of UN documents already bashing Israel:
The Palmer panel’s finding went against every statement the UN secretary general has made about Gaza, the Goldstone report and a report by the UN human rights council in September. If, as Palmer found, the siege is legal in international law, the occupation is too. This must be challenged in court.
Does The Guardian tolerate no dissent from its warped worldview? Must it obtain court rulings validating every criticism of Israel?
9. Quantifying the Spin
A print edition op-ed by Greg Philo, the research director of Glasgow University Media Unit, claimed to quantifiably prove that Israeli spin doctors have hijacked the Mideast narrative in media coverage.
HonestReporting addressed the commentary in more detail, pointing out, among other things, that A) Philo ignored hundreds of rockets fired during the course of a six-month cease-fire, B) denied Israel the right to defend its citizens from terror, and C) appearances at pro-Hamas forums belie Philo’s neutral academic persona.
10. London Riots
As London boiled over in August riots, one report in The Guardian didn’t bother to mention the race, religion, or ethnicity of anyone — except for a reference to a group of Hasidic Jews jeering the police.
When CiF Watch cried foul, The Guardian amended its article.
* * *
All these were just 10 of the most noteworthy examples of The Guardian’s obtuse brand of journalism HonestReporting observed.
On the macro level, the now-defunct Just Journalism (pdf) published a scathing report on The Guardian’s external op-eds over the first half of the year. Among its primary findings: more op-eds were published by Palestinians than by Israelis; all the Israelis given op-ed space were associated with the left-wing of Israeli politics. And three of the Palestinian contributors were either members of Hamas or strongly affiliated with it.
If the readers’ editor is really concerned about al-Guardian being perceived as an anti-Semitic newspaper, Chris Elliott should have some sleepless nights when he assesses the paper’s overall Mideast content from 2011.
Can the paper get any worse in 2012? Only time will tell.
Some images: CC BY-SA HonestReporting.com, flickr/kro-media, and flickr/Shorts and Longs | The Both And.
Samir S. Halabi
8:26 pm
Dec 17, 2011
My only wish is that Israel-hating-Jew-hating journalists such as Deborah Orr will suffer the same fate as many Jews have suffered from Arab-terrorist attrocities in Israel.
See what she has to say if her family were blown up by fanatical shariah loving Islamo-fascists.
Would she still support those evil venomous slime? I doubt it very much.
In 1948 there was approximately 550,000 Arab refugees from post-British-Palestine.
There was also nearly 1,000,000 Jewish refugees made stateless, homeless and pennyless, most were taken in and absorbed by the new fledgling state of Israel. The Arabs in the mainstream were rejected by their bretheren to be used as an open sore weapon for the past 63 years against Israel.
As the second world war came to an end in May 1945 there was around 100,000,000 refugees world wide, how is it that they have all been settled yet not the original 550,000 Arab refugees from Palestine who ifrom the period of 1948 multiplied till today they number around 3.8 to 4,000,000. not including the Arab refugees that became citizens of other countries and the 1.3 million Arab citizens of Israel.
Well-loved. Agree or Disagree:
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Jayson Rex
12:18 pm
Dec 18, 2011
The Guardian has an editorial line that matches exactly the Brits’ taste for young Arabs, also known as the Lawrence of Arabia Syndrome.
Deborah Orr is merely an unknown entity trying desperately to make a living. The Guardian is the only media that offered her this opportunity in exchange for “special type” of comments.
It is high the time we all move forward towards peace, if this is at all possible in regional conflicts where Arab Muslims are involved.
As far as The Guardian is concerned, since the freedom of the press does not include the freedom to lie, cheat and twist the truth, the appropriate action should be taken either in British or European Union courts. End of the story!
Well-loved. Agree or Disagree:
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Charlie
8:48 pm
Dec 20, 2011
Hidden due to low comment rating. Click here to see.
Poorly-rated. Agree or Disagree:
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Ralph Anspach
1:33 am
Jan 08, 2012
What’s hilarious is the utter ignorance of the Guardian editorial board. It writes “If, as Palmer found, the siege is legal in international law, the occupation is too. This must be challenged in court.” Duhhh? Don’t these editors who like to think of themselves as a part of the British Upper-Class intellectual elite realize that the arguments that some settlements are illegal is anchored on the fact that Israel is a legal OCCUPYING power which is supposedly evicting people of the occupied territory in order to replace them with its own people? Don’t they know that the International Court of Justice has already ruled in a non-binding Advisory Opinion that some settlements are illegal precisely because Israel is a legal occupying power. (The ruling is disputed because Israel does not evict “natives” to make way for Jews.)
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Charlie
8:52 pm
Dec 20, 2011
Hidden due to low comment rating. Click here to see.
Poorly-rated. Agree or Disagree:
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ODED
8:47 pm
Dec 22, 2011
Well done.
some of The Guardian “rebukes” I didnt know and its good you pointed it up.
so is it safe to claim that the Guardian editors and correspondents ore biased regarding Israel and the Jews in particular?
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Jerry Meents
9:34 pm
Dec 28, 2011
Is the Guardian stil made that an handful of Jews got rid of the mighty Brittish Army in 1948?
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Edward
10:02 pm
Jan 14, 2012
Britain is still upset that the Jews of Israel were not massacred in 1948 Israel as they were in WW2, without the “protection” of the British Empire.
Eat your black heart Britain, and a big “thank you” for releasing the convicted and “dead within 3 months” bomber of Pan Am 103. /sarc
BTW, the convicted bomber of Pan Am 103 is still alive, 29 months after his release.
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American
6:17 pm
Dec 31, 2011
Zionists are the real Anti-semites, and they are terrorists who are totally against peace! WAKE UP Israel!!! LEARN at the FACTS:
In a tape-recording made by an orthodox moderate named Yitzhak Frankental and later published in the Israeli press, Rabbi Rabinovitch says that if soldiers come to uproot settlers he intends “to scatter the area with roadside bombs like the Arabs do” (quote is his words).
Zionist Rabbi Schachter says: “It is forbidden to pray for peace in Eretz Yisroel, because the Israeli-Arab wars are the ‘beginning of the redemption’ and if there is peace, it will delay the redemption.”
Founder of zionism, Theodor Herzl, promoted anti-semitism to further the zionist cause. He states very clearly in his own diary: “It is essential that the sufferings of Jews…become worse…this will assist in realization of our plans…I have an excellent idea…I shall induce anti-Semites to liquidate Jewish wealth…The anti-Semites will assist us thereby in that they will strengthen the persecution and oppression of Jews.” (from Herzl’s own Diary, Part I, p. 16)
At the Zionist Congress in London in 1937, Dr. Chaim Weizmann established policy with his words: ” The hopes of Europe’s six million Jews are centered on emigration. I was asked, ‘Can you bring six million Jews to Palestine?’ I replied, ‘No’….From the depths of the tragedy I want to save two million young people…The old ones will pass. They will bear their fate or they will not. They were dust, economic and moral dust in a cruel world…Only the branch of the young shall survive…They have to accept it.” (from the book: Holocaust Victims Accuse, p. 25)
One of the founders of the Haganah (the Zionists’ paramilitary militia-army before the 1948 war), Ze’ev Jabotinsky, declared that settlement of the “land” is the only “law”. He declared: “There is no justice, no law, and no God in heaven, only a single law which decides and supercedes all–Jewish settlement of the land.” (from the book: Righteous Victims, p. 108)
FACT: real Jews are AGAINST zionism:
The Rebbe of Satmar, Hungary, Grand Rabbi Yoel Teitelbaum, a high-ranking rabbinical scholar of uncontested holiness, is one of the greatest giants in all of Jewish history. He called zionism “the work of Satan”, “a sacrilege” and “a blasphemy”. He forbade Jews to have any participation with anything even remotely associated with zionism and said that zionism was bound to call the wrath of God upon His people. He maintained this stance with unwavering bravery from the very onset of zionism. He wept that the Holocaust was a direct result of zionism as a punishment from God. In his book Vayoel Moshe (middle of Section 110) he states: “It is because of the Zi0nists that six million Jews were killed. The fact is that this is the bitter punishment stipulated in the Talmud (Tractate Ketuboth, p. 111)
The great Rabbi from Shinova, who was the son of the Holy Sanzer Rabbi of Poland said this 100 years ago, at the dawn of Zionism: “You should know, that when a Jew recites ‘Hear O Israel, G-d is our Lord, G-d is One’ he should have in mind to reject all idolatry in the world, and Zionism is also idolatry, and he must reject it as well.”
In a letter written by the famous Rabbi Tzadok Hakohen of Lublin, Poland, before World War II: “THE CONCLUSION IS TO BE DRAWN THAT IF THE ZIONISTS GAIN DOMINION THEY WILL SEEK TO REMOVE FROM THE HEARTS OF ISRAEL BELIEF IN G-D AND IN THE TRUTH OF THE TORAH. ALL THE INTENT OF THESE INCITERS AND SEDUCERS IS TO CAST ISRAEL INTO INFIDELITY, WHICH IS DESTRUCTION. Tzadok Hakohen”
In a letter from Rabbi Aryeh Leib Alter, known as the Sfas Emes, which he wrote early in the Zionist period, the Rabbi says: “Now behold Satan has come and confused the world….A thick cloak rest over the eyes of the leaders of the Zionists. ONLY OWING TO THEIR LACK OF FAITH AND ABSENCE OF BELIEF IN G-D DO THEY FAIL TO REALIZE THE EXTENT OF THE DANGER INVOLVED IN THEIR PROMISES TO THE MASSES OF THE PEOPLES AMONG WHOM WE LIVE, OF ALL THE WORLDLY DELIGHTS PROVIDED THEY GIVE AID TO THE ZIONISTS. THEY EVEN URGE THEM TO EXPEL JEWS FROM THEIR MIDST. Every sensible person will realize the help they are providing the enemies of the Jewish People…. Aryeh Leib Alter”
In this book, in chapter 26, Rabbi Yitchak Aramah states that the Decree of Exile for the Jewish People is so serious that even if the Jewish People were to terminate the Exile from the Holy land ONE DAY before the willing of G-d, the entire People would be in great danger by virtue of having violated the prohibition of ending the Exile as discussed in the Talmudic Tractate Kesuboth 111.
Plus…there are so MANY MANY more proven historical documents, records, books, statements, and events, all of which show a multiplicity of CLEAR evidences proving beyond doubt that Zionism is terrorism, against Jews, against peace, and has absolutely NOTHING to do with true Judaism. Read all about it yourself, and you will if you have ANY genuine interest in the real, unadulterated TRUTH!
Hot debate. What do you think?
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Edward
10:05 pm
Jan 14, 2012
Let the neteuri karta move to Gaza, and build all the necessary Jewish infrastructure, and demonstrate how “tolerant” hamass is to Jews.
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Shareef Abdul-Kareem
11:40 pm
Jan 02, 2012
I have a weakness for Israel as I am a devoted reader of Torah, thus one may see my response as biased. However I am yet to understand why there is this unnecessary dislike of Jews and Israel. Is it because they are different? Should you dislike someone because they are different? As a black man I believe that in the world we suffer the same effects as the Jews. The only difference is that we fail to instill in our lives a comparative discipline as taught in the Torah.
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Peter LEE
6:25 am
Jan 11, 2012
I would be very grateful nif your editors could tell me, and many other Jewish supporters in Australia, why your pages continually equate anti Israel sentiments with anti semitism.
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Ein Versuch in Redaktionstransparenz « Medien BackSpin
10:55 pm
Jan 31, 2012
[...] Live, sieht danach aus, als er es wert ein Auge drauf zu behalten – besonders an Tagen, wenn die Haut-auf-Israel-drauf-Berichterstattung des Blattes besonders [...]
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SIAP : Student Israel Advocacy Program, Montreal | AskAbigail Productions
2:22 am
Feb 04, 2012
[...] The second part of Prof. Krantz’ talk was to point out how the anti-Israel bias manifests in the media via the choice of articles and words in certain institutional papers, including The New York Times, The Tribune and others. He pointed out that It is important to remember that the editors choose what will go into the paper and how it is reported. This is amply apparent if you follow an NGO like Honest Reporting as I do. This year they even had a contest for who wrote the most dishonest articles, and the Guardian won. [...]
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The Winner of HonestReporting.com’s 2011 Dishonest Reporting Awards: UK’s The Guardian | Honest Reporting
8:09 am
Feb 11, 2012
[...] the Top 10 Reasons why The Guardian won the Dishonest Reporting Award with a landslide plus see the winners in the other [...]
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The Winner of HonestReporting.com?s 2011 Dishonest Reporting Awards: UK?s The Guardian | Honest Reporting
12:38 pm
Feb 17, 2012
[...] the Top 10 Reasons why The Guardian won the Dishonest Reporting Award with a landslide plus see the winners in the other categories: [...]
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William Smart
3:41 pm
Apr 03, 2012
Isn’t it strange that, although all the great scholarly Jews condemned Zionism and the attempt to have a Jewish state, others blindly insist that Israel is some form of wholly venture?
Until I visited this page there were only “Dislike” votes against the words of these real followers of Judaism! How can that be – or is it fashionable to decry historic Judaism these days?
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steve mann
4:01 pm
Apr 03, 2012
“All Great Scholarly Jews”"
Excuse me- I am a great scholarly Jew and I am a committed Zionist.
And what of all those modern Great Scholarly Jewish Israelis whose innovations in all subjects from Medicine to the Arts who are committed Zionists.
However the ones you refer to a usually left wing Liberals who to this day have never recited the Schema!
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L’offensiva “Capitale” del Guardian « Bugie dalle gambe lunghe
11:29 am
Apr 29, 2012
[...] Anche per quest’anno The Guardian ha vinto l’ Award 2011 del Dishonest Reporter. [...]
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Tired of Seeing Israel Slammed in the Media? | Blogs about Israel aggregation
12:43 pm
Aug 07, 2012
[...] Reporter Award highlighting the worst cases of media bias throughout the year. The Guardian was the ignoble winner of the award for [...]
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Did Hamas have advance info about the Kerem Shalom attack? | Blogs about Israel aggregation
1:58 pm
Aug 14, 2012
[...] delivered to the Beeb each day — paid for by UK taxpayer money. The Guardian, which won the 2011 Dishonest Reporting Award, is a declining left-wing [...]
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Did Hamas have advance info about the Kerem Shalom attack? | The Conservative Papers
9:33 am
Aug 16, 2012
[...] are delivered to the Beeb each day — paid for by UK taxpayer money. The Guardian, which won the 2011 Dishonest Reporting Award, is a declining left-wing [...]
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Dorse Feline pictures
5:48 am
Apr 10, 2013
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