Yesterday I wrote one of a few pieces pointing out Ha’aretz’s nasty insertion of politics into the repertoire of Rihanna.
That piece and some of the terms I used on Facebook when promoting it drew the ire of a Ha’aretz reporter and blogger who I have met a few times socially. She’s been rather upset with me for some time dating back to a Facebook post pointing out that young upstart The Times of Israel would breeze past ancient Ha’aretz in Facebook likes.
Well The Times of Israel cruised past Ha’aretz and has stormed on to pass 100,000 likes (which ToI bloggers celebrated in some style at the Jerusalem Press Club this week).
While at that party, news was breaking about Ha’aretz’s bizarre claims from the Rihanna concert and that prompted my post yesterday and the various Facebook statuses.
Over on Ha’aretz’s blog platform I had the following post directed at me and introduced with the delightful status message “This one goes out to all the morons. You know who you are.”
Which set the scene nicely for this:
The theory goes in some unhinged corners of the Internet that Rihanna’s lyric was purposely misreported in order to demonstrate that Rihanna really, deep down, does hate Israel, even though she ignored pressure to boycott the Jewish state. Because the goal of Haaretz as ‘an Arab propaganda tool’ don’t you know, is to prop up the BDS movement and speed along the pace of Israel’s destruction.
I believe I am the poster boy for the “unhinged corners of the Internet”. Strangely, what she says in that quote has a great deal of truth in it. The rest of her piece desperately asserts the long stream of compounding journalistic and editorial mistakes which lead to Ha’aretz’s grovelling apology yesterday, were completely innocent mistakes.
Well I’ve answered her piece in The Times of Israel. I carefully deconstruct this simple “mistake” and show we can easily find the same pattern of defamatory pro-Palestinian agenda pushing in this piece as we have in numerous other “mistakes” made by Ha’aretz. I’m not saying this didn’t start as a mistake, it’s just it was a mistake many at Ha’aretz were desperate to believe in.
I encourage you to read it all, but the conclusion is pretty damning:
We have two possible, reinforcing conclusions:
- Ha’aretz is one of the most inept journalistic enterprises still afforded credibility today;
- Ha’aretz has a political agenda and this agenda must be inserted into as many stories as possible.
I have looked hard for a “mistake” in Ha’aretz which paints Bibi or Likud in an uncommonly favourable light. Surely pure “mistakes” would occur evenly across the political spectrum?
Neither conclusions look great for Ha’aretz and I’d say both are taking a firm toll on its reputation and circulation. Unfortunately it appears the vast number of errors made in their pursuit of journalistic ineptitude happened to align with their well known politically biased agenda.
And so, I assert, there exists within this otherwise stupid piece about a fairly poor concert, a state of “mens rea”. This drives many at Ha’aretz to take what may have been a mistake and use it to push its marginalised and discredited views on “Palestine”.
Ha’aretz has a collective groupthink which is guilty of defaming Israel repeatedly.
