When Is an Honoured Journalist Not even a Journalist? When the Israelis say so.

This short report raises a lot of very important questions about the very idea of journalism today. Questions about  who decides what journalism is  and who is a journalist in a time when citizen journalists are doing a better job of challenging Power than their professional counterparts .

 The official 'licencing ' of Journalists by governments is something I was never comfortable with. That is why I never ever applied for accreditation  from the Indian Government's Press Information Bureau. It was too much about control for me. Control exerted through, what I thought, were 'bribes'. Like the  subsidised Government accommodation in prime New Delhi locations, for example.

What really bothers me about  this report, though is the clout  and control the Israelis have over what the world is allowed to know.

 An institution that is supposed to chronicle the History of Journalism should not be bowing so easily to Pressure.

I must say that I am not really surprised.  I had been expecting this  and just hoping it would not happen.

DC Museum Backtracks: Won’t Honor Slain Gaza Cameramen

When Is a Journalist Not a Journalist?

by Jason Ditz, May 13, 2013

Faced with growing condemnation from the Israeli government and its affiliated lobbies, the DC-based Newseum, a museum chronicling the history of journalism, has announced that it will rescind its inclusion of two cameramen from the memorial honoring slain journalists of 2012.

The two cameramen were working for the al-Aqsa TV station in the Gaza Strip when Israeli warplanes deliberatedbombed their media van, killing them. Israel insisted that since al-Aqsa TV is state-run, and the Gaza Strip is run by Hamas, it makes all al-Aqsa employees de facto Hamas and therefore “terrorists.”

The attacks came as part of November’s Israeli war on Gaza, and the targeting of journalists as well as newspaper offices was a subject of much criticism. The ADL insisted that including the slain Gazans in a list of journalists killed during the line of duty was “advancing their agenda.” Media watchdogs have uniformly included them on similar lists.

The Newseum, however, insists that they are now backtracking because of the controversy, and that they are no longer sure if the slain were “truly journalists.”

http://news.antiwar.com/2013/05/13/dc-museum-backtracks-wont-honor-slain-gaza-cameramen/