CAMERA BLOG
January 30, 2015

Building on his important critique of Middle East media coverage (in Tablet), his short follow-up (also in Tablet), and his more detailed exploration (in The Atlantic), former Associated Press reporter Matti Friedman this week delivered a masterful speech on how and why journalists get the story of Israel and the Palestinians so wrong. The full text of the lecture, delivered at a Bicom dinner, can be found here. You should read it. Meanwhile, we’ve put together a few highlights from the speech, and a couple of thoughts, below.

In his presentation, Friedman asks, and then sets out to answer, How have the doings in a country that constitutes 0.01 per cent of the world’s surface become the focus of angst, loathing, and condemnation more than any other?…I saw how a fictional image of Israel and of its enemies was manufactured, polished, and propagated to devastating effect by inflating certain details, ignoring others, and presenting the result as an accurate picture of reality. READ MORE