How serious is Mr. Podger about the integrity of journalism?

In relation to our article ‘Fairness and balance’ in P&I reporting on the Middle East

Harry Glasbeek, Canada, Nov 20, 2024

I found the recent contribution by Andrew Podger to P & I, Fairness and balance in P & I reporting on the Middle East—putting it as politely as I can—to be curious. Not so politely, I might have used the description ‘paternalistic’ or, worse, the piece as one expressing “mock concern’ from one on high.

Podger expresses sympathy for an impoverished electronic outlet’s built-in obstacle when it comes to meeting the standards to which respectable journalists hold themselves. He stresses the need to keep facts separate from opinion and to be fair and balanced, that is, to represent the other view (apparently there always is one).

He then pronounces himself a non-expert on the middle east. Humbly he acknowledges that he has not spotted any inaccurate statement of fact. Hence, one would have thought, he cannot complain about the unfortunate fact that poor little P & I cannot be expected to meet the real journalistic standard of keeping fact and opinion apart. And then this ‘objective’ writer, full of sympathy for P & I’s difficulties, goes on to mix fact and opinion. He avers that it is ridiculous for some P & I’s contributors to compare some of IDF’s excesses with Hamas’ deliberate killings and hostage taking on 7 October. He says that ignores the rules of conflict. This assertion is undocumented, a statement of pure opinion. It is asserted as a fact. Note also Mr. Podger’s choice of the word conflict, instead of say, war. And, of course, it is easy to spot the deliberate omission of an indisputable fact which negates his opinion: there is no reference to the legal fact that peoples whose territories are illegally occupied, have a right to resist. Neither is there any mention of the notion that, even if there was ever any factual basis to the claim of self-defence, this justification was, factually and legally, eroded as the ‘conflict/war’ came to be no longer based on Hamas’ existing capability to attack any time soon

How serious is Mr. Podger about the integrity of journalism?

On words again: Podger speaks to the possibility that the IDF’s responses thus far might well be described as ‘disproportionate’, a bit like a teenager out of control. He is not so gracious about Hamas. The term he uses for Hamas’s attack on 7 October is ‘brutal’. Fairness and balance are manifestly not always uppermost in the Podger mind.

Mr. Podger, having noted his own relative ignorance of facts on the ground, is not shy about offering his geopolitical views. He accuses (the brutal) Hamas of being quite brilliant. Its 7 October shocking attack suckered Israel into anger and fear, causing it to abandon the path to peace it was following just before the attack. Many observers might be skeptical about Israel’s interest in any permanent peace deal, given its leader’s appearance at the UN with a map which showed all of the contested terrain to be Israeli. Still, as one opinion, among many, this Podger argument has some credibility. Of course, it is not based on any objective facts. Nonetheless, Mr. Podger offers it. It is almost as if he were one of those P & I contributors whose unbalanced, undocumented, unanchored opinions he laments.

Then there are the actual, uncontested facts on which all these supposedly unfair/unbalanced contributors do rely: the findings by oodles of international bodies (UN, Medecins sans frontieres, Palestinian journalists on the spot) that there is an apartheid system in place; the numbers of deaths, destructions of hospitals, denials of food, the bombings of refugee camps, renewal of attacks on Palestinian people in the West Bank (all reported, amongst others, by the standard mainstream Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz). Might these background facts not ground the P & I contributors’ opinions somewhat? Might Mr. Podger be asked to re-think his position that this conflict/war/war crimes circumstance, unlike the question of, say, whether more money should be spent on subsidizing electric vehicles, has two sides at all?

Finally, has Mr. Podger noticed that the ‘real’ journalists he admires do not report on the middle east conflict/war/war crimes circumstances as they personally observe them? The IDF will not let them into Gaza unless they are supervised. How factual are their fact-findings? How well-based are their opinions?

Mr. Podger is fortunate that P & I would publish his solemn concerns, unencumbered either by facts or logic as they are. It speaks to that journal’s integrity.