And if you thought that the newspapers were bad...

Shahar Golan posted this on his frgdr.com blog a couple of weeks ago.



It is an interview with Ada Yonath, Professor of Chemistry at Machon Weizmann, and who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Chemistry last month.

Or two interviews with Prof. Yonath

Or one.

As you'll see from the clip, Yonath was interviewed on Channel 10's evening news programme by Miki Haimovich. The interview was then lightly repackaged, and rebroadcast as new the next morning, making it seem that she was being interviewed anew by the breakfast show hosts, Haim Etgar and Sivan Cohen.

It might seem like a small thing. It is Channel 10's content, after all?

I disagree. Nothing would have been lost by re-broadcasting the original interview, Haimovitch and all, the next morning. Except the veneer of 'exclusivity'.

More to the point, I think that this is only a small step away from creating subtlely different questions to fit the answers that Prof. Yonath had helpfully provided earlier.

Which is only a short hop and skip away from creating radically different questions to fit Prof Yonath's answers - and misrepresenting her in the process, of course.

I don't think it is a small thing. If I'd wanted entertainment of this nature, I'd go take out a Woody Allen film. To be honest, I find it rather patronising. Perhaps the editors at Channel 10 rate their viewers so lowly as to think that they can only engage with the news if it is live and direct? It's that 24 Hour rolling news thing again...

Okay, I'm being a grouch this morning. I promise that my next post will be more positive.

Again, hat tip to frgdr.com for pointing out the chicanery on the part of Channel 10.and setting up the clip. I didn't notice it. I mean, it isn't like I'd be paying attention to the news in Hebrew...

Newspapers

I read a lot, but I stopped getting a daily newspaper quite a while ago: I no longer see the point, to be quite honest. For one thing, newspapers lost the battle against 24 hour news channels quite a while ago,

(incidentally, I loathe rolling news channels...well, that's not entirely true. I have a love/hate/hate relationship with them, I suppose. I always come away from half an hour with Sky News or BBC feeling slightly less informed than I was previously. Maybe it's just me, grey cells corroding and all that...)

and for another, the wonders of the World Wide Web mean that I can get pretty much anything I want, gratis

(although Mr Murdoch seems determined to change that)

but this aside, the truth is that - in the news sections, at least - there is rarely anything worth reading. Straightforward news accounts are generally rather scanty, and more often than not are not followed up, leaving the curious reader with the duty to go get his detailed stuff elsewhere. Opinion and thinly-veiled partisan commentary generally trump sober analysis and fact; and, a lot of the time, new reports are plucked from the same general sources - Reuters, AP, AFP - and gently recycled and spun according to the whims and inclinations of the outlet.

(On the last point, it's worth reading Nick Davies' excellent Flat Earth News. You'll never look at a newspaper the same way again, I promise you...)

A couple of contemporary examples from Eretz Yisrael:

Goldstone: Has effectively become a football game, with the press merely keeping score. The fundamental questions have been lost beneath what is charmingly referred to as the PR War.

The Amnesty report on the (mis)use of Palestinian water resources: Even if one accepts every word to be true...it just ain't news. It hasn't been news for years. As proof, I recommend reading Bernard Wasserstein's Israel & Palestine, particularly pp 80 - 97. Covers pretty much the same ground, in cool and coherent language...and was published six years ago.

Maybe I'm just getting cantankerous and crochety as I ease belly first into middle-age...

Anyway, these days I get a paper just at the weekend, which keep me happy for the week. The supplements, thankfully, run to different deadline priorities; write ups tend to have more of a consistence and narration-al coherency to them, I think. It's pretty easy, I think, to bullshit with 500 words, but it becomes much more difficult with 2500.

And I subscribe to a couple of magazines...

There's an interesting piece in this weeks New Yorker about Gaza, Gilad Shalit and the Guys in Green. Long enough to remind us of the historical antecedents to the sorry state of affairs down south at the moment. No one comes out of it looking good. Worth reading.

On a completely unrelated note: Is there any chance of someone getting the rain to, like, stop? I know I sound ungrateful and all, but my clothes are all wet, I can't do the laundry and I have to dash out for a cigarette between breaks in the rain that's been thundering down since Friday. Most inconsiderate.

On the good side, the Sukkah has come down. Not quite sure how - perhaps the wind dismantled it - but frankly, I don't care. As someone said once, Mission Accomplished.

Somehow, I think I'm going to regret saying that.

Walt Whitman - O Captain! My Captain!

1 O CAPTAIN! my Captain! our fearful trip is done;
The ship has weather’d every rack, the prize we sought is won;
The port is near, the bells I hear, the people all exulting,
While follow eyes the steady keel, the vessel grim and daring:
But O heart! heart! heart!	5
O the bleeding drops of red,
Where on the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.
2 O Captain! my Captain! rise up and hear the bells;
Rise up—for you the flag is flung—for you the bugle trills;	10
For you bouquets and ribbon’d wreaths—for you the shores a-crowding;
For you they call, the swaying mass, their eager faces turning;
Here Captain! dear father!
This arm beneath your head;
It is some dream that on the deck,	15
You’ve fallen cold and dead.
3 My Captain does not answer, his lips are pale and still;
My father does not feel my arm, he has no pulse nor will;
The ship is anchor’d safe and sound, its voyage closed and done;
From fearful trip, the victor ship, comes in with object won;	20
Exult, O shores, and ring, O bells!
But I, with mournful tread,
Walk the deck my Captain lies,
Fallen cold and dead.

Whitman wrote this poem after the assassination of Abraham Lincoln; it was translated into Hebrew by poet and songwriter Naomi Shemer; she dedicated it to the memory of Yitzhak Rabin after his assassination, 14 years ago tonight (following the Hebrew calender).

Quick follow up to my last post about immigration "policy".

From Ynetnews.com: A report composed by the Knesset Research and Information Center accuses the government for having a failed enforcement policy, a conflict of interest and lacking implementation of decisions regarding the handling of foreign workers...the report determines that "the State of Israel has no immigration policy, no regulated policy towards foreign workers, asylum seekers, illegal aliens, and human trafficking victims (Emphasis mine). In each of these cases there are laws and regulations; however these are established as a response to certain events, and not as a result of a planned and organized discussion."

The full news report is here

The English website for the Knesset's Research and Information Centre is here: the report hasn't been translated into English - and probably won't be for a while - but the website is an interesting resource, and worth looking at regardless.

The Land of Oz

A Jpost article about the efficacy of Operation Oz: apparently, they've deported 700 illegal migrants, and consider themselves responsible for the voluntary repatriation of another 2400. One sentence in the report caught my eye: "As part of their daily routine, Oz inspectors have continued to patrol the country's migrant-worker concentrations, mainly in southern Tel Aviv, to pick up the illegal residents, arrest them and if possible, expel them from the country the same day." (Italics mine).

I'm not sure if this is legal or not, and I certainly think that at the least, it raises issues about due process: but I'm pretty sure that most European countries would love to be able to behave the same way...

Also in Jpost: an article highlighting the concerns of residents in South Tel Aviv's Hatikva neighbourhood to the continued presence of the migrant workers and illegal immigrants (isn't it interesting, how hardly anyone bothers to distinguish between the one and the other?) in their 'hood.

I don't agree with their conclusions, but I sympathise with their predicament. For as long as the government refuses to instigate a comprehensive, coherent and fair policy on asylum, immigration and migration, tensions like these will continue to multiply.

In case you wondered: I think that there should be a consistent policy on migration (for non-Jews), including the right for long term migrants to remain as permanent residents; I think that there ought to be careful thought about the role of migrant workers in supporting the Israeli economy - it is no accident that farmers in the South protested yesterday about the difficulties that they face in employing staff to work on the fields, at wages that allow the farms to remain economically viable; and I think there should be a careful and thorough overhaul of the (non) process managing claims for asylum that exists at the moment.

It's pretty comfortable for unconscionable politicians to bundle all non-Jewish migrants into one amorphous mass, tar them all with the same brush and claim that they are an unwarranted burden on the state (not that the state spends much on asylum seekers, to start off with: in any case, migrant workers give far more back to the state than they can ever even dream of receiving); it is also convenient to claim that they are responsible for everything from the increase in crime rates and the spread of communicable diseases to the threat of intermarriage and the increase in unemployment amongst native-born Israelis.

But it doesn't take much imagination or intelligence to figure out that the reality is far more complicated than this nice fairy tale. It's time to take off the green tinted spectacles; it's time to implement a fair, transparent and just immigration policy.

The Evil Genius of Israeli Advertising (again!)

Advertisements in Israel often seem like a masterclass in provocation - whether by shooting a catalogue for a high-end fashion chain by the Separation Wall, by giving the phrase "water-cooler moment" an entirely different meaning (courtesy of Bar Rafaeli), or by proposing the rescue of inter-married Jews as an act of charity. (Speaking from a personal experience, I consider my marriage an act of charity - in my favour, obviously.)

According to today's Ha'aretz, this cheerful - or, perhaps, cheerfully cynical - exercise in fermenting public approbation may be about to hit a new high - or low, depending upon your perspective - courtesy of the benighted Italian Prime Minister, Silvio Berlusconi.

"According to Antonello Zappadu, an Italian photographer from Sardinia who took pictures of Berlusconi in the company of half-naked female guests at the billionaire politician's Villa Certosa on the island's Costa Smeralda, a "very large advertising firm" in Israel has asked to purchase the rights to the photographs."

The correct thing to do, I suppose, would be to deplore the invasion of Berlusconi's privacy and dignity. On the other hand, I can't help but remember that his soon-to-be ex-wife cited his proclivity for "consorting with minors" in her decision to leave him; or the fact that his media empire is largely built on the same level of titillating nonsense. And that isn't even without beginning to go into the avalanche of gaffes, misogyny and general misanthropy with which he has deluded us over the years.

So I'm just going to snigger.

(ps - I've seen some of the pictures; the description "in the company of half naked female guests", whilst factually correct, is perhaps on the more benign side. )

One for the Weekend

דפנה והעוגיות, or Daphna and the Cookies - or Daphna and the Biscuits, if you're a non-Yank like me. I wonder which translation they choose?

It matters not. Enjoy...