of bias, balance and the baby killed in palestine

The bias, the bowing to Jewish  pressure , is  pretty visible,  even in this ombudsman's defense   of the publication of a photograph I had blogged earlier.  That there was even a need to defend that photo says a lot about the  huge pressure  that is applied on Western Media by  Israel and its  supporters. Look at  how the Palestinian rockets are deemed " reprehensible" and "aimed at terrorizing Israeli civilians".  Look at the talk of one sided  "balance" that is desired by the   defenders of  Israeli doings.  A balance that  I have rarely seen  as far as the Palestinian point view is concerned . Not in mainstream western media .    

A photograph may be worth a thousand words, but even at its most revealing it never tells an entire story. It is the capture of a single moment, a split-second version of the truth. But if it is an effective photograph, it moves the viewer toward a larger truth.

That’s certainly the case for a front-page photograph published Nov. 15, an image of a man’s anguish as he held the shrouded body of his 11-month-old son, who was killed in a bomb strike on the man’s house in Gaza.

That the man is Palestinian — not a terrorist but a journalist — and that the bomb was dropped by Israelis, to my mind, is almost beside the point. This photo depicted loss and pain, the horrific cost to innocents on both sides of the violence in the Middle East.

But many Post readers saw it differently. Jewish groups and American Jews in large numbers wrote to the ombudsman and to Post editors, protesting the photo as biased.

Post staff then authenticated and verified the facts behind the Associated Press photo. The dead baby was real. The bombing was real.

Many readers asked why The Post didn’t balance the photo of the grieving father with one of Israelis who had lost a loved one from the Gaza rocket fire. That’s a valid question.

The answer is that The Post cannot publish photographs that don’t exist. No Israeli civilian had been killed by Gaza rocket fire since Oct. 29, 2011, more than a year earlier. The first Israeli civilian deaths from Gaza rocket fire in 2012 did not take place until Nov. 15, when Hamas, the group that controls Gaza, began firing more accurate and deadly missiles in response to the Israeli offensive that had begun the day before. There were no recent photos of Israeli casualties to be had on the night of Nov. 14.

Still, on an inside page Nov. 15, The Post ran a photo of an Israeli mother taking refuge in a bomb shelter with her young children. That reflects the truth of life in southern Israel.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/patrick-pexton-photo-of-dead-baby-in-gaza-holds-part-of-the-truth/2012/11/23/0cd54eb0-342a-11e2-bb9b-288a310849ee_story.html