Academic Study Exposes Reuters Propaganda
December 8, 2011 13:04 by Simon Plosker
Reuters is one of our final three nominees for this year’s Dishonest Reporter Award by virtue of its appalling attempt to redefine the word “terror” in the aftermath of a Palestinian bomb attack next to a Jerusalem bus stop.
Indeed, we’ve long criticized Reuters for failing to call terror by its name. But that’s not all. Over the years, we’ve highlighted biased Reuters articles, headlines, calendar photos, fauxtography, and a multitude of other transgressions.
Now, an academic study published in the Journal of Applied Business Research has found that Reuters coverage of the Middle East conflict is systematically tainted by propaganda and influences readers to side with the Palestinians and Arab states against Israel. Henry Silverman writes on PR Web:
Researcher Henry Silverman of Roosevelt University analyzed a sample of fifty news-oriented articles published on the Reuters.com websites for the use of classic propaganda techniques, logical fallacies and violations of the Reuters Handbook of Journalism, a manual of guiding ethical principles for the company’s journalists. Across the articles, over 1,100 occurrences of propaganda, fallacies and handbook violations in 41 categories were identified and classified.
In the second part of the study, a group of thirty-three university students were surveyed, before and after reading the articles, to assess their attitudes and motivation to support one or the other belligerent parties in the Middle East conflict, i.e., the Palestinians/Arabs or the Israelis. The study found that on average, subject sentiment shifted significantly following the readings in favor of the Arabs and that this shift was associated with particular propaganda techniques and logical fallacies appearing in the stories.
“Governments have long used propaganda to whip up public support during wartime and to demonize enemies”, says Silverman. “Reuters is adopting these same techniques to covertly shape audience perceptions and opinion in violation of its corporate governance charter.” Silverman points out that this is particularly troubling since “the news agency promotes itself as a paragon of accurate and impartial reporting and its stories are read by millions of people who are led to believe they are being provided objective facts”.
We are not surprised at these findings and await a response from Reuters with interest. After all, it isn’t our standards that Reuters are violating – it is their own journalistic code.
Reuters operates in over 200 cities in 94 countries in about 20 languages, and is picked up by many media outlets for foreign news stories. For such an organization to be producing anti-Israel propaganda on a global scale is extremely serious.
You can read the full study here (PDF).
Will this be what pushes Reuters over the finish line as a genuine contender for the Dishonest Reporter Award? All will be revealed very soon.
Image: CC BY-SA HonestReporting.com, flickr/Samuel M. Livingston.
Albert Reingewirtz
5:39 pm
Dec 08, 2011
Reuters Shreusters! It is only part of the whole world anti- Semitic machinery with the Media their weapon of choice followed by Academia.
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Christopher Proudlove
7:27 pm
Dec 08, 2011
I’m a retired journalist trained under the dictum of “Comment is free, facts are sacred.” This is a saying of the late CP Scott, editor of The Guardian in its Manchester days. He was a friend of the first President of Israel, Chaim Weizmann, and a leading Gentile Zionist. It is sad to see The Guardian is now anti-Israel and distorts the facts when it come to reporting Jewish-Palestinian affairs. As I observe world media reporting about Israel I’m horrified by the lack of objectivity and pro-Palestian bias.To calm myself, and to counter this misreporting, I write a blog six days a week for http://www.christiansforzion.com giving a more accurate view about Israel.
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Eda Chodrow
9:04 pm
Dec 08, 2011
I have noticed what can be described as ‘product placement’ of pro-Arab and anti-Semitic material in seemingly apolitical and unrelated printed matter and other media. The most recent example was in the Sunday, 11/27/11 (I think), fashion supplement to the NY Times. Tucked in among articles about extravagant clothing, expensive decorating and other expected content was an article about the poor, mistreated residents of Gaza.The material seems to go unnoticed and unanswered, but it certainly influences.
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jerry
10:10 pm
Dec 08, 2011
Anti-semitism sells! Envy and anti-semitism are synonomous! When Israel did not exist did we not have anti-semitism? Jews have a target on their back! It is as if, anti-semitism is hard-wired.
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Graham R-B
7:32 pm
Jan 10, 2012
History has shown the Jewish people becomes the stronger and persists more doggedly, facing Antisemitism, while in a benevolent and tolerant environment it easily melts away through increased intermarriage.
Sadly it is true that there is no greater unifying force for its enemies than their hatred of the Jewish people generally and Israel in particular.
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Mickey Oberman
10:50 pm
Dec 08, 2011
I am not a lawyer.
At what point does anti Jewish, anti Israel propaganda cross the line between mere hatred, mere lies and mere immorality to illegal activities such as defamation of character, threatening or encouraging violence, causing undo hardship, creating costly damage repair, aiding and abetting criminal activity?
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Marvin Feil
2:49 am
Dec 09, 2011
Here is the ADL’s definition.
Anti-Semitism is prejudice and/or discrimination against Jews.
Anti-Semitism can be based on hatred against Jews because of their religious beliefs, their group membership (ethnicity) and sometimes on the erroneous belief that Jews are a race. Jews are, in fact, of all different races.
© 2006 Anti-Defamation League
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Mickey Oberman
7:47 pm
Dec 09, 2011
These letters are all well and good but do nothing to address the question I posed.
Surely, at some point, legal suits can be pursued against the initiators and conveyors of those canards and vicious lies.
Surely there is some legal recourse.
Surely we Jews are not obliged to be the perpetual recipients of this evil.
Surely the ADL must have at its disposal the means and the knowledge to legally combat the perpetrators.
All of their academic studies and reported findings are of no avail if they are going to make nice with those who commit what, some at least, are vicious crimes.
I am weary of the so called representatives of Jewish organizations, both religious and secular, who go to events like Obama’s phony, insulting Hannukah parties and smile and shake hands and fraternize with those who would annihilate us.
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LUIS FROM MEXICO
11:56 pm
Dec 08, 2011
SO….WHAT ELSE IS NEW!!!!!!. REUTERS AND ALL THE OTHER NEWS AGENCIES ARE INFILTRATED BY ARAB PETRODOLLARS IN THE FORM OF STOCK OR IN THE FORM OF “COMMISSIONS” TO WRITERS AND COLUMNISTS; SO WHY BE SURPRISED BY THE WAY THEY LIE ABOUT ISRAEL?
NO MATTER HOW MANY TIMES HONEST REPORTERS WILL PROVE REUTERS LIES, THEY ARE MORE INTERESTED IN PROTECTING THEIR PERSONAL INTERESTS ($$$) THAN PROTECTING THE TRUTH.
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jecheskel
1:06 am
Dec 09, 2011
More and more I’ve came to the conclusion that Reuters and other media don’t distribute biased reports due to a lack of understanding of the situation in the middle east, but due to their dislike of a jewish state. We must accept, that for us jewish people, there not going to be a fair judgment.
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Interested
1:29 am
Dec 09, 2011
Some years ago it was reported that Arab terrorists threatened to blow up Reuters head office in Switzerland if Reuters posted articles that were anti-Palestinian. Ever since, Reuters has been one-eyed in its treatment of the Israel-Palestinian conflict. Speaks volumes for Reuters’ yielding to the threats and the also for the Palestinian thugs/murderers who threaten to destroy and kill those who are “unsympathetic”.
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Michael Anisfeld
3:40 am
Dec 09, 2011
And the saddest part of it all was that Reuters founder – Paul Julius Reuter – was a German Jew. Wonder what he would think if he were around today?
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J. Fields
3:53 am
Dec 09, 2011
I’m happy to see that the study was conducted by someone affiliated with the university from which I graduated. I read the comments with considerable interest and found nothing with which to disagree.
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Martin
6:31 pm
Dec 10, 2011
The news media is uninterested in the truth. Their main interest is in staying alive. They are unable to produce any truthful accusations or reporting from the islamic world for fear of beatings, rape, murder, or the very least , being deported, if they are lucky.
The oil rich regimes pay regularly billions of dollars per year (Saudi is the main problem in sending monies to it’s embassies around the world for the losers to convert to Islam, to force countries to destabilise, deligitimse, divest, embargo and boycott the state of Israel.
Oil revenues make worthwhile back handers, advertising revenues ectc.
Now what was the question?
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A.Karseboom
7:20 pm
Dec 10, 2011
Nothing new under the sun
The same goes for the CNN BBC and other international media.
Who would the the world blame if there were no Israeli or Jews
They would have to be invented
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Sære medier: Facebook, Google, Reuters, Rushdie, nym wars og mere « Veritas Universalis
12:18 am
Dec 12, 2011
[...] kilder: Honest Reporting, The New York Post, The New York Post, Radio Free Europe, DNA India, The Register, Hindustan Times, [...]
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Mel Kassenoff
12:26 am
Dec 12, 2011
The way to “punish” Reuters is through their corporate pocketbook, by refusing to buy Thomson financial products all or virtually all of which have significant competition.
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Nice Credit Report photos | Short Sale Tax Implications
5:53 am
Dec 31, 2011
[...] by HonestReporting.com Created for HonestReporting.com on Dec. 8, 2011 for the original article Academic Study Exposes Reuters Propaganda. Image Credit: Samuel M. Livingston Please credit as "CC BY-SA HonestReporting.com" [...]
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The Ozi Zion Blog » Blog Archive » Bias and propaganda at Reuters
3:14 pm
Mar 05, 2012
[...] Reporting points us to an important review here of bias and propaganda by the largest multimedia purveyor of media information – Thomson [...]
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