AP Banned Jerusalem Reporters From Interviewing Prestigious Israeli Schola

[Valin]

Yid With A Lid:

Tuesday, December 2, 2014

 

Former AP journalist Matti Friedman wrote an article in the Atlantic, What the Media Gets Wrong About Israel, that explains how the Associated Press enforces an anti-Israel bias. In the piece Friedman reveals​ that well-known Israeli scholar Dr. Gerald Steinberg, Professor at Bar Ilan University and President of NGO Monitor, is the only person the AP Jerusalem bureau has ever subjected to an interview ban. Apparently the Associated Press is doing its best to protect anti-Israel NGOs.

 

 

Friedman's article expanded upon an essay he wrote in the Tablet in late August. The Atlantic piece states that the Associated Press Jerusalem Bureau was especially protective of Non Governmental Organizations (NGOs):

 

In the aftermath of the three-week Gaza war of 2008-2009, not yet quite understanding the way things work, I spent a week or so writing a story about NGOs like Human Rights Watch, whose work on Israel had just been subject to an unusual public lashing in The New York Times by its own founder, Robert Bernstein. (The Middle East, he wrote, “is populated by authoritarian regimes with appalling human rights records. Yet in recent years Human Rights Watch has written far more condemnations of Israel for violations of international law than of any other country in the region.”)...Editors killed the story.

 

 

Around this time, a Jerusalem-based group called NGO Monitor was battling the international organizations condemning Israel after the Gaza conflict, and though the group was very much a pro-Israel outfit and by no means an objective observer, it could have offered some partisan counterpoint in our articles to charges by NGOs that Israel had committed “war crimes.” But the bureau’s explicit orders to reporters were to never quote the group or its director, an American-raised professor named Gerald Steinberg. In my time as an AP writer moving through the local conflict, with its myriad lunatics, bigots, and killers, the only person I ever saw subjected to an interview ban was this professor.

 

Dr. Steinberg was not surprised by Friedman's revelation that the AP did not allow contact with him about NGOs condemnation of Israel during the post Gaza period:

 

(Snip)