Journalist and analyst Tom Gross has this to add to our recent communique on partisan editing at the International Herald Tribune:
The New York Times-owned IHT, aimed mainly at audiences in Europe and Asia, also regularly runs photos that don’t correspond with its accompanying stories — photos designed to paint Israel in a more menacing light.
For example, on January 14, 2004, a Palestinian mother, blackmailed into becoming a suicide bomber rather than face death through honor killing after she was caught cheating on her husband, murdered four Israelis at the checkpoint through which Palestinian workers cross into Israel from Gaza.
The next day, January 15, 2004, instead of showing a photo of the bomb scene, or its victims, or the perpetrator, the IHT ran a huge photo across most of the top of its front page of an Israeli soldier pointing a gun at Palestinian laborers, and another large photo at the top of page 4 showing another Israeli soldier, gun in hand, near unarmed Palestinian civilians. The IHT’s story on the bombing made no references to the identity of the victims. The photos, which took up considerably more space than the text of the articles, bore virtually no relevance to the articles, or the previous day’s news.
These photos contrast with those used that day by traditionally anti-Israeli newspapers like The Guardian of London and El Pais of Madrid, both of which ran photos of the suicide bomber, gun in hand. The Financial Times ran a photo that day on page one of Israeli medics examining the remnants of the bomber’s victims. These photos all came from news agencies to which the IHT subscribes, and could have used.
El Pais also called her a terrorist in its page one headline, a word that the IHT strenuously seeks to avoid using when talking about Palestinian terror, as opposed to other forms of terror (example, headline: “Paris won’t release terrorist,” IHT page 3, January 17, 2004, in reference to the Lebanese killer of an American military attach?.)
