by Jack Englehard
The NY Post has not noticed that Hamas began the hostilities and Israel is responding to 140 rockets in one night on its civilians, and one critically wounded woman.
Earlier, in another column, we asked if the New York Post has changed sides, from friend to foe as regards Israel.
Today, we wonder no more. Dig this for a headline: “Israeli airstrikes in Gaza Strip kill pregnant woman, her 1-year-old daughter.”
Never mind that Hamas started it and accelerated it with more than 100 rockets being fired into Israel as thousands of Israelis along the Gaza border are sent running to their bomb shelters.
That gets no mention and even the rest of the story gives it a passive voice moral equivalency twist, as in – “A flare-up of violence.”
It is no surprise that the story was picked up from the AP, never a friend, but it is a surprise that the Post carried it, with that howler of a headline, as is.
This means that 1. They’ve grown lazy over there at the international desk, or,2, they’ve changed policy in order to catch up with the rest of fake news.
That would be a pity. New Yorkers and Post readers everywhere have relied on the Post as about the only big-time paper to cover Israel’s back, as well as Trump’s.
The paper features a true friend in columnist Michael Goodwin and its editorials are still a voice of sanity.
A voice of fairness and sanity we can never expect from the BBC.Sure enough, the BBC duplicated the headline that ran in the Post.
Coincidence, or coordinated? In any case, that didn’t take long. Actually, it did, because the system works like this throughout the media --
Silence when Israel is attacked by a barrage of rockets (or terrorist kites and balloons), only to awaken at Israel’s response – and THEN cover the story but slanted against Israel.
Israel, through its foreign ministry, protested the BBC headline. But no matter what – the damage has been done.
Everybody knows the game. Some win, some lose, and Israel seldom gets the prize. You only get a few words to make your case. That’s no game, really.
It’s war – the headline wars, which is how you sway public opinion through 280 words or less, preferably less.
Because these days most readers want it down and dirty and seldom get to “the rest of the story.”
The headline is what people wake up to and go to bed at night remembering. Headlines, at this time of tweets, and in this era of impatience, are a powerful means of persuasion.
In the wrong hands, as we see, headlines can manipulate truth into falsehood and can turn the good guys into the bad guys, a conjuring we expose fully in this thriller.
So the Big Lie, any Big Lie, sticks.
From New York to London, as people read it, aha, they say, it’s those Israelis again.
In the midst of yet another heated conflict with Hamas, the Israeli marketing department needs to sharpen its focus and shape up to the new reality.
New York-based bestselling American novelist Jack Engelhard writes regularly for Arutz Sheva.
He is the author of the international book-to-movie bestseller “Indecent Proposal” and most recently the two inside journalism thrillers “The Bathsheba Deadline” and “News Anchor Sweetheart, Hollywood Edition.” Engelhard is the recipient of the Ben Hecht Award for Literary Excellence. Website: www.jackengelhard.com
Jack Englehard's classic international bestselling novel Indecent Proposal, which later became a worldwide hit movie, has been republished to meet readers’ demands. His other major works include Compulsive: A Novel, his award-winning post-Holocaust Montreal memoir Escape from Mount Moriah, plus Slot Attendant: A Novel About A Novelist. His website: www.jackengelhard.com
Source: http://www.israelnationalnews.com/Articles/Article.aspx/22581
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