The first two mandatory lessons for budding journalists, starting with middle schoolers, are to develop powerful, permanent strands of curiosity and skepticism.
No exceptions in any case. Otherwise, it would be like entering a battlefield disarmed.
A journalist lacking curiosity and skepticism is worthless.
This is the category to which Eddie Sanders of the Los Angeles Titanic has been consigned after his ludicrous page 3 story in this morning’s edition, “A textbook case of bias for both Israelis, Palestinians.”
The newspaper’s Jerusalem bureau chief, the tripe cooked up by Mr. Sanders was typical of the Titanic’s anti-Israel propaganda. Logically, the thickly fictionalized story could have been written by Islamic terrorists from Hamas or Hezbollah.
Even an idiot, Jew or Gentile, would be outraged by the reporter’s mental holiday.
The reporter’s thesis: The vastly different textbooks used by Jewish kids in Israel and by Palestinian kids in Israel are morally equivalent, heavily unreliable, because both versions are equally filled with lies about the other culture.
How do we know these assertions to be irretrievably true?
Because an Arab-loaded study funded, of all people, by the historically Jew-loathing U.S. State Dept., and approved by the Jew-hating Obama administration, said so.
Even a moderately astute child could have told you the fix was in, the results pre-determined.
The “study” was so obviously Arab-weighted that the Netanyahu government either gave a thumbs down – or, perhaps, raised a deserved single finger to the Obama White House.
Have You Heard?
The background: Envious Arabs have attacked Jews in Israel every day since the country was granted universally recognized statehood 65 years ago. In the matter of provocation, Israel has been 99 percent blameless.
No stranger to being an incurious, open-mouthed, unobservant, willful tool of terrorists, the slovenly Mr. Sanders was besieged by red warning flags on this subject, but he ignorantly shunned them.
Except for the fact that not a single person on the planet would swallow any of the obviously ignorant claims gullibly proffered by Mr. Sanders, it was a fine piece.
If the Titanic were a normal newspaper, this story would be a firable offense for the reporter, as it also should have been for the copy editor who processed it.
8 Questions You Must Answer
A slender sampling of surface-level red flag questions that a vaguely conscientious reporter, even one as left-wing lazy as Mr. Sanders, would have posed:
Since the debate centered in the most volatile intersection on earth where one side deviously and murderously has been attacking the other for upwards of three-quarters of a century, aren’t even you slightly suspicious about why this was undertaken?
- Name one related element of presumed objectivity and verify it.
- What was the State Dept’s motivation?
- Who at State ordered it?
- What do you know about him or her?
- What were the contours of the “study”?
- What were the qualifications of the “researchers”?
- Identify their baselines for judgments.
If you, Mr. Sanders, believe that Israelis and their Palestinian assailants are moral equals, the Titanic needs to start conducting background checks before approving “journalists” assigned to Jerusalem.
