Stephanie L. Freid talked to Esther Schapira, whose followup video on the Muhammad al-Dura affair recently aired on German TV. In 2002, Schapira was the first Western journalist to raise questions about Al-Dura.
Schapira on why she revisited the affair:
People view footage and believe they are eyewitnesses to an event when in fact they are not. I knew this before but never realized it so acutely until working on this documentary. The problem usually lies with a correspondent who didn’t see an event with his own eyes. Information is delivered by fixers at the spot who may not be free of their own political agenda, and we journalists report it but have no way of validating. And if the images fit a theory or idea we already have in our minds, they are the most dangerous of all because we don’t question them.
Read the whole article, and see this al-Dura timeline for further background.
