Monday, March 22, 2010

Haaretz Misleads with Obama Poll

The JPost has the scoop today -- though its not really a scoop.

Last week Haaretz deceived the Israeli public with their article about US Vice President Joe Biden's comments at a satire event, took his comments out of context, implied that his comments were serious, and used them as a pretext to further their agenda of discrediting Jewish building in Jerusalem.

Then...Haaretz's Friday headline was Haaretz poll: Most Israelis see Obama as fair and friendly

And the article opens with a gushing review of President Obama:

U.S. President Barack Obama's popularity may be declining in American public opinion, but a sweeping majority of Israelis think his treatment of this country is friendly and fair, according to a Haaretz-Dialog poll conducted this week.

The poll also found that most Israelis don't believe politicians who call Obama anti-Semitic or hostile to Israel, or who say he is "striving to topple Netanyahu."

However, the JPost reports:

Haaretz misled readers to give the impression that an overwhelming majority of Israelis see US President Barack Obama as “fair and friendly” toward the country, the newspaper’s pollster, Tel Aviv University professor Camil Fuchs, said on Sunday.

The English edition elaborated near a picture of Obama that “69% say Obama is fair and friendly.”

The story itself gives no numbers, but the lead says “A sweeping majority of Israelis think his treatment of this country is friendly and fair.”

The English edition contains no graphic distributing the actual numbers, either online or in print.

The print and online versions of the newspaper’s Hebrew edition included a graphic indicating that just 18 percent of respondents considered Obama “friendly” toward Israel, 3 percentage points fewer than the 21% who called the president “hostile” to the Jewish state.

Read the rest of the JPost expose here.

Haaretz bills itself as the "Newspaper for Thinking People" -- the reality is more like "Haaretz: The newspaper where we do the thinking for you, distort poll data to fit our agenda, attempt to discredit the Jewish State, and ensure you follow our paper's ideology through lies and deception."


Visiting Israel?
Learn to Shoot at
Caliber-3 with top Israeli Anti-Terror Experts!


Wherever I am, my blog turns towards Eretz Yisrael טובה הארץ מאד מאד

8 comments:

Pedro said...

Ha'aretz really is a "Newspaper for Thinking People".There we can read Gideon Levy & Amira Hass (yes, they are ridiculous) but also Moshe Arens, Israel Harel, Amiel Unger or karni Eldad, sober analysis (Amos Harel, Avi Issacharoff, Ze'ev Segal, Nehemia Shtrasler...)a very good business and arts & leisure suplements. Arutz Sheva,JPost(and the National-Religious comunity as a whole) should learn a thing or two with Ha'aretz and start fight for a Israel more Jewish-Zionist-liberal and less Haredi/arab.

Jameel @ The Muqata said...

Pedro: When their "news" article distort fact to match their Opinion, the reader is unable to discern fact from opinion (or agenda).

That's not a paper or thinking people -- but one for those who only read what they want to hear.

Pedro said...

Jameel:That's not my case.I think that is important to know what the other side (left) think.

Jameel @ The Muqata said...

Pedro: And how can you tell their news from opinion?

Pedro said...

It's easy.Articles written by Akiva Eldar, Amira Hass, Gideon Levy or Jack Khoury are always biased.The others, if you have any doubts about them, you can check with the others newspapers and usually they say the same thing (as you can see in this post «And you shall choose life (and not move hospitals)» )

Lurker said...

Jameel: And how can you tell their news from opinion?

Pedro: It's easy. Articles written by Akiva Eldar, Amira Hass, Gideon Levy or Jack Khoury are always biased.

But their misleading article on the poll was not written by any of those individuals -- thus undermining your claim. And their misleading article on Joe Biden's "roast" comments is not credited to any of those individuals either -- thus undermining your claim even further.

Pedro: The others, if you have any doubts about them, you can check with the others newspapers...

If you have to check other newspapers to verify the accuracy of the articles in Haaretz, then why not simply read the other newspapers?

Pedro said...

Lurker:«For some hints about this, read this JPost article from 2 years ago, and then this Ha'aretz (can't trust them though) article from a month ago.
Does it prove a connection? No.
But it looks mighty suspicious.» - JoeSettler
«YNET: Terrorists don't kill Jews, Shrapnel does»
Apparently Ha'aretz is a reliable source of information and one misleading article don't turn a good newspaper into a propaganda panflet (by the way, Biden's stupid joke and its timing is a political statement).
And where else can we read a op. such as «It's wrong to suggest Israel was direct result of Holocaust» or «Judenrein Palestine » without 'price tags' but on Ha'aretz?

Commenter Abbi said...

I think pedro is a bit confused, but I do agree that especially in Israel it's good policy to buy or read all the newspapers in English and in Hebrew and the truth is usually somewhere in the middle of all them.

Jpost is by no means a "paper of record". Last week they claimed that Jeffrey Goldberg is "close" with Obama which he scoffed at in his blog (bascially, Gil Hoffman read a post from Goldberg's blog where he said he spoke to some White House aides and he deduced from that that GB is tight with Obama). They're two bits above my high school newspaper. Yediot can be fantastically sensationalist, Makor Rishon is biased to the right, Maariv is run by crooks. You have to read all of them and, as I said, the truth is somewhere in the middle.

Search the Muqata

LinkWithin

Related Posts with Thumbnails