A few months ago, it would've been unthinkable that a major daily like the Sunday Times of London would publish a critical, comprehensive look at Human Rights Watch.
This isn't just about Marc Garlasco (HRW's military expert quietly dismissed after Mere Rhetoric exposed his embarassing Nazi memorabilia collection), Joe Stork (deputy head of HRW, who once praised the Munich massacre in a radical leftist paper), Sarah Leah Whitson (who made a controversial fund-raising visit in Saudi Arabia), or Judge Richard Goldstone (a conflict of intererst forced him to resign his position on HRW's board of directors).
The moral of the story is deeper than this foursome:
Human Rights Watch does perform a useful task, but its critics raise troubling questions that go beyond Garlasco’s hobby or raising money from Saudis. Why put such effort into publicising alleged human-rights violations in some countries but not others? Why does HRW seem so credulous of civilian witnesses in places like Gaza and Afghanistan but so sceptical of anyone in a uniform?
It may be that organisations like HRW that depend on the media for their profile — and therefore their donations — concentrate too much on places that the media already cares about.
Yes, HRW depends on the media for its profile. And when it comes to bashing Israel, HRW provides what the news services need most — something NGO-Monitor refers to a halo effect:
The evidence shows that many journalists simply reprint NGO reports without question or verification. This is known as the “halo effect”, and violates both journalistic ethics, which require skepticism and independent verification, and the norm when reporting from other sources, including government officials. But when a “highly respected human rights watchdog” such as Amnesty International or HRW makes a statement, journalists tend to ignore the bias and repeat this as fact.
