* The Daily Telegraph reports on growing Palestinian calls for an investigation into Arafat’s finances:
As confusion over Mr Arafat’s condition grew, a Palestinian legislator last night called for his financial adviser, Mohammed Rashid, who controls a multi-billion dollar network of Palestine Liberation Organisation accounts, to be investigated.
Over the past 40 years, Mr Arafat’s PLO has built up a global empire of investments, worth an estimated $4.2 billion to $6.5 billion. (£2.3-£3.5 billion). Meanwhile the Palestinian Authority, which administers the territories, is virtually bankrupt.
* This BBC report nicely sums up the Palestinian leadership’s jockeying for power.
*Washington Post media columnist Howard Kurtz a story on a reporter dealing with rumors of Arafat’s death. There’s a lesson here about accepting info too quickly and relying on dubious sources. (Hat tip: Romanesko)
* The Jerusalem Center for Public Affairs has a new report on groups like HonestReporting that monitor coverage of the Mideast conflict. The conclusion is that ‘pro-Israeli media watching causes journalists to report more objectively, influences policymakers, and makes the media more accountable… The actions of the Jewish media watchers constitute an important democratic process.’
* The Committee to Protect Journalists has a very interesting report about the media’s reliance on fixers in Iraq. The criticisms here could just as easily apply to the Mideast conflict:
"What we’re seeing now are fixers as surrogates," says Orville Schell, dean of the Berkeley School of Journalism. In Iraq, "they are the Seeing Eye Dogs, or rangers, for the men and women who can’t safely go out and do the reporting themselves."
According to Schell, it is not only the dangers posed to correspondents by anti-Western sentiment that have increased reliance on fixers. "The role of the fixer has grown with parachute journalism," he says, and notes that since the end of the Cold War, media outlets and journalism schools have failed to cultivate regional expertise. "When I was in China, most correspondents there were Chinese studies graduates. To some extent, universities have bred a generation of journalists who need prosthetic devices to cover certain areas," Schell argues.
(Hat tip: Romanesko)
