Elder of Ziyon recently posted about a “journalism” conference in Istanbul, Turkey – one of the most hostile countries for journalists in the world – last month designed to help participants develop skills to more effectively promote the Palestinian narrative in the international media. That’s right, these “journalists” weren’t there to learn how to report more accurately on the region, but to be more effective advocates for Palestine.
The conference was sponsored by the Palestine International Forum for Media and Communication.
Anti-Israel propagandists-cum-journalists from around the world attended, including Ben White, but also Guardian contributor Antony Lowenstein, and veteran reporter Jonathan Steele , who led a panel addressing the “obstacles to objective coverage of Palestine in the media”.
Steel is currently a Guardian contributor, but once served as the paper’s chief foreign correspondent, which included a stint in Beirut where he covered the 2nd Lebanon War in 2006, in which his pro-Hezbollah bias was hard to miss.
Even leaving his personal anti-Israel bias aside, it’s not at all surprising that Steele attended, as he is among those on the hard left who sincerely believe the international media is overwhelmingly based IN FAVOR OF ISRAEL. He once argued, in a Guardian column, that “the pressure that pro-Israel campaigners put on the…US media” results in not only “positive” media coverage of Israel, but serves to unduly influence American foreign policy – evoking antisemitic tropes about the putatively injurious impact of Jewish power that the Guardian promotes more than any other British news site.
Steele is among those in the British media who no doubt shares with his fellow Istanbul conference participants not only the view that being pro-Palestinian is the only moral option, but that, in doing so, they are ‘speaking truth to (Jewish) power’.