Friday, October 31, 2008

Radio-Canada Wrong In Airing Pro-Palestinian Advocacy Film

Radio-Canada Wrong In Airing Pro-Palestinian Advocacy Film

October 31, 2008

 
Dear HonestReporting Canada subscriber:
 
 
On October 23, Radio-Canada, the French arm of the CBC, aired the pro-Palestinian advocacy film "Peace, propaganda and the promised land" on its documentary film program "Les grands reportages". By airing a film rife with false premises, serious omissions, and unfounded malicious allegations, the network not only misinformed Canadians about the politics and history of the Middle East, it also breached its own journalistic standards and practices by airing a one-sided partisan polemic bent on vilifying a fellow democracy, the state of Israel.
 
Introducing the film, Radio-Canada host Simon Durivage's rhetorical questions and leading opinions parroted the film's anti-Israel thesis. To view the introduction click here or on the image below.
 

(Note: HRC English translation appears below)

Durivage: "Peace, propaganda and the promised land. Do the American media view Israeli settlement of occupied territories as a defensive gesture only? ... According to Middle East experts, for forty years, the settlement policy of the Hebrew state has grown inside the occupied Palestinian territories. Result: daily violence on both the Palestinian and Israeli side. So what message do the American media convey regarding this interminable conflict? Do they distort the judgment of our southern neighbours?"

Ironically, it's Radio-Canada and Durivage who have distorted the judgment of Canadian viewers by presenting the Arab narrative as fact by exclusively blaming violence on Israeli settlements and ignoring all other possible causes for the conflict.

The film, which was produced in 2003/4 by the Media Education Foundation, an advocacy group whose mandate is to "answer the challenge posed by the radical and accelerating corporate threat to democracy" and whose board of advisors includes the likes of notorious anti-Israel activists like Noam Chomsky and Naomi Klein, claims to show "the foreign policy interests of American political elites - working in combination with Israeli public relations strategies - exercise a powerful influence over news reporting about the Middle East conflict."

To view the "documentary" in its entirety (80-minutes in length) please click here or on the image below. (Note: Radio-Canada aired an edited down and more condensed one-hour version of the film with French-language voice-overs)

A New York Times review of the film found that the "pro-Palestinian documentary attempts to prosecute Israel in the court of U.S. public opinion", while noting that the "documentary largely ignores Palestinian leadership, which has surely played a part in the conflict's broken vows and broken hearts. And such a lack of dispassion weakens the one-sided film's bold and detailed argument."

Likewise, a scholarly analysis of the film by Yitzhak Santis, the Director of Middle East Affairs for the Jewish Community Relations Council (JCRC) in 2004, noted that the film was full of "decontextualizations, disinformation, selective emphasis and blatant lies, lack of balancing perspectives, lack of citations/documentation to back up assertions of facts, omission of facts, and straw man argumentations." To read the full report online please click here.

Among its many flaws, the film presents quotes from radical anti-Israel activists presenting them as if they were objective commentators to the conflict, it shows a series of news reports out of context and without explanation, and makes blanket statements about Israeli/Jewish attempts to control the media which are baseless and without merit. Furthermore, the film virtually ignores terrorism against Israeli civilians and the very well known Palestinian intimidation of the press.

Santis' report concludes by noting that "It should be incumbent upon public television stations that hold the trust of its viewers to promote "truth in packaging" by informing its audience that this is not an objective study of media coverage of this conflict, but an advocacy piece with a political agenda."

The film, which offered "special thanks" in its credits to pro-Palestinian organizations like: Electronic Intifadah, Al Awda, International Solidarity Movement, and the Arab American Anti-Discrimination Committee, was also dedicated in the memory of famous pro-Palestinian activist Edward Said.

At a bare minimum, Radio-Canada should have tested the program against the organization's guidelines for "point-of-view documentaries in the sense of advocacy". According to Radio-Canada's guidelines for Journalistic Standards and Practices:

"Great caution should be taken to protect the integrity of the Corporation's impartiality in information programming and its independence of special interest groups... In considering such works of opinion or argument for broadcast, the CBC (read Radio-Canada) has to assure fairness and balance by other means. The CBC should also guard against political or economic interest groups and lobbies exploiting this avenue."

Radio-Canada asks its own programmers to apply various tests when deciding whether or nor to feature a particular documentary. It asks programmers to ensure that "a production should be of particular excellence and pertinence in the eyes of the CBC", that the film "should be prominently identified as a work of opinion at the beginning and at the end", that the "CBC must be completely satisfied that this work is financed independently from any party having a direct interest in the issue", that facts should be "respected and arguments should reasonably flow from those facts... to ensure that the argument presented does not rest on false evidence", and finally that "the broadcast of a clearly partisan production from a single perspective obligates the CBC to provide an appropriate reflection of other pertinent points of view."

Using the national broadcaster's own guidelines, the film can't be defined as being of a "particular excellence" given its numerous errors and misrepresentations and its clear nature as an advocacy piece for pro-Palestinian propaganda purposes. Finally, as Radio-Canada has failed to provide alternative perspectives, the network failed to give "an appropriate reflection of other pertinent points of view" as a counterbalance.

Radio-Canada has abdicated its responsibility to do the necessary due diligence and quality control checks which should have ensured that this film was not aired in the first place. While we do not endorse actions to censor the media, by the fact that this film failed to live up to Radio-Canada's own litmus test for documentary standards, it is incumbent upon the network to atone for its mistake in news judgment for airing this shoddy pro-Palestinian advocacy film.
 
What You Can Do To Make A Difference: 

Tell Radio-Canada that its October 23 broadcast of "Peace, propaganda and the promised land" on "Les grands reportages" failed to inform its viewers that the film was not an objective study of media coverage of the Arab-Israeli conflict, but a pro-Palestinian advocacy tool with a political agenda, rife with errors and omissions that have seriously misled Canadians.

Ask Radio-Canada to apologize, to conduct a formal review, and to implement stricter quality control protocols to ensure that this doesn't happen again. Please send polite and rational emails to Radio-Canada Ombudsman Julie Miville-Dechene at ombudsman@radio-canada.ca or call (514) 597-4757 to voice your concerns.
 
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We have become a nation of beggars

Terence Corcoran reports in the National Post on Friday, January 16, 2009 that the STIMULUS everyone is yelling for may only work over a short period and may actually MAKE THE ECONOMY WORSE over longer periods.

[Read the article below for the researchers who studied this phenomenon.]

POINTS

- "What if, as a wide and growing school of economists now suspect, the government spending and stimulus theory is a crock that is shovel-ready to be heaved out into the barnyard of economic waste?"

- Even disciples of Keynes, such as Harvard's Greg Mankiw, recently highlighted economic studies that show government spending binges -- shocks, they are sometimes called -- don't seem to help the economy grow. They might even make it worse.

-One of the studies cited by Mr. Mankiw was by two European economists (Andrew Mountford and Harald Uhlig), titled "What are the Effects of Fiscal Shocks?" It looked at big deficit-financed spending increases and found that they stimulate the economy for the first year, but "only weakly" compared with a deficit financed tax cut. The overriding problem is that the deficits crowd out private investment and, over the long run, may make the economy worse. "The resulting higher debt burdens may have long-term consequences which are far worse than the short-term increase in GDP."

-A paper by two economists, including the current chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, Olivier Blanchard, concluded that increased taxes and "increases in government spending have a strong negative effect on private investment spending."

-Roberto Perotti, an Italian economist with links to Columbia University, in "Estimating the Effects of Fiscal Policy in OECD Countries," found nothing but bad news for Keynesians. Economic growth is little changed after big increases in government spending, but there are signs of weakening private investment.

- What we all might logically intuit to be true -- spend government money, especially borrowed money, and you stimulate growth -- has long been thought to be a fallacy by some economists. That thought is now spreading. British economist William Buiter said the massive Obama fiscal stimulus proposals "are afflicted by the Keynesian fallacy on steroids."

The whole article by Terrance Corcoran follows:

Are you "shovel-ready," poised to hit the ground running, or merely desperate for cheap cash to get through the recession? If so, here's your last chance to apply to Ottawa for a piece of the massive government spending-bailout-infrastructure-stimulus operation now being prepared for Finance Minister Jim Flaherty's Jan. 27 budget extravaganza.

To get you going, the National Post has created an all-purpose Stimulus Canada application document. Simply make sure your company/institution fills out the form here to get in on the action.

We're just kidding, of course, or at least we were until our satirical Stimulus Canada General Application Form was mugged by reality, which is rapidly turning out to be funnier than the fanciful idea of a government department called Stimulus Canada. To all intents and purposes, Stimulus Canada already exists.

Government money to flow, the taps are opening, deficits are no problem. The spending, as Stephen Harper said after a meeting with the premiers on Friday, will be "very significant" and there will be "very significant deficits." That could mean new spending of $20-billion and deficits of $40-billion.

Industry groups, corporate opportunists, charities, municipal politicians, arts groups, provincial premiers, tech firms, mining companies, forestry operators, banks, money lenders -- in fact, just about everybody has come forward to get in on Canada's portion of what is turning out to be a mad global government stimulus pandemic.

Each claims to have a plan or an idea that they say would produce jobs, spending, investment and activity that would get Canada through the recession and stimulate the economy.

At some point, though, the clamour of claims and calls becomes absurd, and that point looks to have been crossed the other day in the United States when porn merchant Larry Flint said the U.S. sex industry was falling on hard times, business was down 25%, and it needed a $5-billion slice of the $1.2-billion U.S. stimulus program.

And why not?

Mr. Flint has a point. It is not totally illogical for anyone to think that way. If you spend a dollar somewhere -- whether building a bridge or operating a forest company or buying a car -- it generates activity. And, after all, it's a grand old economic theory, created by John Maynard Keynes, that spending, especially government spending, rolls through the economy on a giant multiplier, piling jobs on jobs, growth on growth.

Except for one problem: What if it's not true? What if, as a wide and growing school of economists now suspect, the government spending and stimulus theory is a crock that is shovel-ready to be heaved out into the barnyard of economic waste?

The Prime Minister, in his comments on Friday, seemed to be riding right into the barnyard. He said the government would be simply "borrowing money that is not being used" and "that business is afraid to invest." By borrowing that money, and turning it over to all the groups and interests looking for part of the stimulus spending, he would be jump-starting activity while the private sector got its legs back.

Even disciples of Keynes, such as Harvard's Greg Mankiw, recently highlighted economic studies that show government spending binges -- shocks, they are sometimes called -- don't seem to help the economy grow. They might even make it worse.

One of the studies cited by Mr. Mankiw was by two European economists (Andrew Mountford and Harald Uhlig), titled "What are the Effects of Fiscal Shocks?" It looked at big deficit-financed spending increases and found that they stimulate the economy for the first year, but "only weakly" compared with a deficit financed tax cut. The overriding problem is that the deficits crowd out private investment and, over the long run, may make the economy worse. "The resulting higher debt burdens may have long-term consequences which are far worse than the short-term increase in GDP."

Two other studies point in the same direction. A paper by two economists, including the current chief economist at the International Monetary Fund, Olivier Blanchard, concluded that increased taxes and "increases in government spending have a strong negative effect on private investment spending."

Roberto Perotti, an Italian economist with links to Columbia University, in "Estimating the Effects of Fiscal Policy in OECD Countries," found nothing but bad news for Keynesians. Economic growth is little changed after big increases in government spending, but there are signs of weakening private investment.

What we all might logically intuit to be true -- spend government money, especially borrowed money, and you stimulate growth -- has long been thought to be a fallacy by some economists. That thought is now spreading. British economist William Buiter said the massive Obama fiscal stimulus proposals "are afflicted by the Keynesian fallacy on steroids."

Over at Stimulus Canada, Mr. Harper's plan looks somewhat more modest and Canada is not in the same fiscal fix as the United States. But Ottawa and the provinces are clearly ready to borrow big wads of money from the future to stimulate the economy today. It's money that is supposedly sitting out there in the timid hands of investors who will be repaid with tax dollars later.

But if that stimulus spending does not generate much fresh economic growth, and the borrowing chews up money that private investors could invest in the future, the shovel-ready brigades who get the cash today will produce only short term gains at the expense of the long term health of the economy.

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