Now it is time to meet a journalist at the CBC: Derek Stoffel. He is a foreign correspondent and one of journalists reporting on Operation Protective Edge 2014. He is also an instructor in journalism and gave a speech at the University of Regina School of Journalism’s annual James M. Minifie Lecture.
“Journalism and good stories are about real people, not talking heads,” he said.
“There are so many misconceptions about the Middle East and the people who live there,” he said. “You need to be immersed in a region, such as the Middle East, to really understand it. But that immersion is becoming all too rare, Stoffel said. Funding is not there. “As a result, journalists have to write what they’ve dubbed ‘the melt’—merging content from other sources into a story that appears to be original, but isn’t.
“No reporter becomes a journalist to melt,” he said.
“That’s not serving the audiences,” Stoffel said. Although melting is cheap—without travel costs or fees to security advisers, fixers and translators—it degrades quality journalism, he said.
Stoffel ended the evening with a plea for members of the public to begin agitating for better journalism from the CBC and their government.
This is from the reporter who immersed himself in Gaza in the summer of 2014 during operation Protective Edge. He shared his Gaza experiences with us showing us the destruction of homes, giving us the number of dead and injured reminding us that these were civilians. I remember only one report about, not from, Israel that included the death of four year old Daniel Tragerman killed in his home at Kibbutz Nahal Oz by a mortar shell fired from Gaza on August 22, 2014. Listening to Stoffel you would not have known anything about this boy. His reference to Daniel seemed like a throw away-oh and by the way, a four year old died in Israel.
It seems, based on my research, that the CBC didn’t spend much time in Southern Israel, “immersed in the region,” speaking to the citizens who had been traumatized by rockets, over and over and over again.
Derek Stoffel, as far as I am aware of, did not interview residents in southern Israel, particularly Sderot. If he had, it may have been once. Yet the damage done to these families is devastating. He did not speak to the children; ask them about playgrounds underground rather than outside. He did not speak to the psychological damage. He was too busy photographing the destruction of buildings in Gaza that, in fact, were hiding bombs and rockets.
These are the only comments I found about the actions of Hamas from Stoffel. Two tweets and one report.
@DerekStoffelCBC
“Gaza security source tells @CBCNews Israelis warned those in house of attack, locals came as human shields – why high # of casualties. #CBC” 11:36 AM – 08 Jul 2014
“@IDFSpokesperson says a rocket fired from #Gaza has landed in Sderot, a town in southern #Israel. No injuries or damage reported. #CBC 5:22 AM – 21 Aug 2016.”
Perhaps it is my age, but I don’t tend to get my news from tweets. They tend to be without context.
August 6, 2014 Stoffel reported that others had seen rockets launched from civilian areas.
And then the truth came out. But not from the CBC.
August 7, 2014 reports from Spanish, Indian and Italian journalists came out about the censorship of journalists in Gaza by Hamas.
In 2015, one year later, there was a scathing report about AP, an association that provided background reports for CBC, what I think Stoffel would call “melting.”
“The AP did not include in its report that Hamas’ tactics were clear as far as back as July 8, the first day of the war, when its spokesperson, Sami Abu Zuhri, appeared on Al-Aqsa TV to call on Palestinian civilians to serve as human shields. ‘The people oppose the Israeli fighter planes with their bodies alone … We, the [Hamas] movement, call on our people to adopt this method to protect the Palestinian homes,’ he declared. A week later, the Hamas Interior Ministry issued guidelines for whom it called its ‘activists’ on social media: ‘Don’t forget to always add ‘innocent civilian’ or ‘innocent citizen’ in your description of those killed in Israeli attacks on Gaza … Avoid publishing pictures of rockets fired into Israel from city centers… It was widely reported during the war that Hamas was engaged in intimidation of Western media outlets, to the point that it drew a protest from foreign correspondents residing in Israel—a group noted for its antagonistic relationship with the Israeli military. If the Western media was subjected to pressure, what about organizations residing in the Hamas-controlled territory?
Did I miss Stoffel’s tweets apologizing for the omission of these facts? Or did I miss his reports the year later apologizing for not telling the audience the truth about the situation in Gaza, putting the reports from Gaza in context-that the reporters were intimidated? Does he not teach in journalism that the sin of omission of facts is as serious if, not more so, than the sin of commission? One can verify a statement but how does one prove the lack of facts reported. What if others had not reported that Hamas was censoring and intimidating reporters?
And the last question I have about Stoffel and the CBC. We are pre-programmed to believe that the country from which the reporter is stationed is the one under attack, not the aggressor. Yet, the CBC and Stoffel decided to report from the “country” that started a war; the aggressor. Not the country under attack; Israel. If Stoffel had been a reporter during WWII, would he have spent most of his time reporting from Nazi run Munich or Berlin on the effects of war on the enemy rather than reporting on the effects of the war on the Allies?
From cijnews http://en.cijnews.com/?p=45861
