Posted on 06/28/2008 6:56:47 AM PDT by Lonesome in Massachussets
Paris
To understand the al-Dura affair, it helps to keep one thing in mind: In France, you can't own up to a mistake. This is a country where the law of the Circus Maximus still applies: Vae victis, Woe to the vanquished. Slip, and it's thumbs-down. Not for nothing was Brennus a Gaul. His modern French heirs don't do apologies well, or at all if they can possibly help it. Why should they? That would be an admission of weakness. Blink, and you become the fall guy.
So, in the case of Muhammad al-Dura-a 12-year-old Palestinian boy allegedly killed by Israeli fire during a skirmish in the Gaza strip on September 30, 2000-it was not really to be expected that the journalist who released the 59-second news report, Charles Enderlin, longtime Jerusalem correspondent for France 2 TV, would immediately admit having hastily slapped together sensational footage supplied by the channel's regular Palestinian stringer, and not checked whose bullets had, in fact, killed, or perhaps even not killed, the boy.
(Excerpt) Read more at weeklystandard.com ...
He, like almost everyone else I'd spoken to, rated facts far below reputation.
Yes, it seems to be a society in which people suffer from status panic as if it were the throes of death.
Social death, I suppose.
Reminds me of the story of Rigoberta Menchu, a Mayan lady from Guatemala, who invented ‘eyewitness’ accounts of U.S. backed genocide of indigenous people.
When exposed as false, the response from the left was:
“Well, even if it wasn’t true, it could have been true”
She is still being feted by leftwingers here.
Actually, in some ways this is much worse than even Rathergate, since at least CBS could be shamed into acting against Rather, Mapes, and their merry crew. CBS did not come clean but did feel obliged to respond seriously to the issue. In the case of Enderlin and his Pali-terror propaganda, all these years later, there is still absolutely no willingness of the French media or TV2 to deal at all with the outrageous episode.
“fake but accurate” defense rides again
Of course, what all of these cases also share is a complete leack of accuracy and a depraved indifference to facts displayed by virtually all of the media who refuse to investigate and expose Enderlin, Menchu, Rather, et al.
oops, that should be ‘lack’ of accuracy, of course!!
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