How AP Botched Investigation of Gaza Civilian Deaths

Posed photographs. Intentional miscategorizations. Buried corrections. One-sided sourcing. Cherry-picked quotes. And a just-plain-wrong conclusion about "most" Gaza casualties being civilians.




On February 13, 2015, the Associated Press published and distributed an article that stirred the conscience of the world. It gave its many readers—“AP news content is seen by half the world’s population,” according to the wire agency’s website—a disturbing picture of Israel as a serial violator of the norms of warfare, wantonly and indiscriminately slaughtering civilians during last summer’s war with Hamas in Gaza. The AP had conducted what it called “the most painstaking attempt to date” to determine who was killed in Israeli strikes on houses in the war. The New York-based news agency examined 247 airstrikes on homes—interviewing witnesses, visiting attack sites and compiling a detailed casualty count. Its probe determined that out of 844 dead from those strikes, 508 (or just over 60 percent) were children, women and older men, “all presumed to be civilians.”

Hanan Ashrawi, executive committee member of the Palestine Liberation Organization, told the AP: “Either they [Israelis] have the worst army in the world that constantly misses targets and hits civilians, or they are deliberately killing civilians.” If most of those killed are civilians, she added, “You cannot call them collateral damage.”


The AP took it one step further, citing what it called “preliminary” UN figures that 66 percent of the overall Palestinian death toll during the war (not only from house strikes) was civilians. There was some rebuttal from Israeli officials but the general approach of the article, which was illustrated with eight searing photographs, seemed designed to substantiate Ms. Ashrawi’s vehement comments. The AP found that children under 16 made up one-third of the total deaths, that in 83 strikes on houses (or what it calls “residential compounds”), three or more members of one family died, and that the killed included just “96 confirmed or suspected militants,” just more than 11 percent of the total (“though the actual number could be higher since armed groups have not released detailed casualty lists”).

It was the stuff of which journalism award submissions are made.

Publications, aggregation sites and broadcast outlets picking up the AP probe ranged from the New York Times to the Drudge Report and Al Jazeera America, from the Washington Post to ABC News (The AP provided subscribers with two versions of the article, a roughly 2,250-word story and one about half that size). The U.K.’s Daily Mail and The Independent both ran the piece, no doubt reinforcing the British public’s already dim view of Israel. Even Stars and Stripes, the newspaper for U.S. Armed Forces, ran the AP “exclusive.” The wide pickup was a coup for the oldest and most ubiquitous of wire services, which operates in more than 280 locations worldwide and counts 1,400 U.S. daily newspapers among his members, plus thousands of TV and radio broadcast members.
There is just one problem. The AP’s exclusive investigation was botched in just about every imaginable way.
We conducted an investigation of the AP investigation. We (the authors) have formed a nonprofit investigative project, The Mideast Reporter, that is going to do a lot of that kind of thing. We found that the news agency reached faulty conclusions based on selective information, cherry-picked quotes, and above all its “painstaking” survey was fundamentally flawed, and was set into motion by slanted, politically biased non-governmental organizations.
Some of it is Journalism 101 stuff, such as failing to write accurate headlines and failing to fully and fairly quote a principal source on a crucial issue. A lead photograph simultaneously exploited a 6-year-old child while inadequately identifying his father—a Hamas commander—as a “Hamas policeman.” And correcting captions violating its ethics rules only after we brought the issue to the AP’s attention—but limiting those corrections to an archive not usually accessed by the public, rather than the articles themselves.
A video segment, released concurrently, was even worse, and was structured almost as a kind of multimedia argument for bringing Israel to the International Criminal Court for war crimes, using as its principal source a fervent critic of Israel.
In its reporting, the AP disregarded its own code of ethics, as well as the Society of Professional Journalists’ Code of Ethics.
We strenuously sought the AP’s comment for this article. We sent follow-up queries when there were responses, but our attempts to get the AP’s point of view proved largely unsuccessful. Comment was sought from the three AP reporters who shared the byline on the Gaza air strikes examination, Karin Laub, Fares Akram and Mohammed Daraghmeh, as well as the Gaza-based staff photographer who produced the eight photographs, Adel Hana. None of the four would comment on the article (though in fairness, we were told that Mr. Hana’s grasp of English is limited). Questions were also submitted to Jerusalem bureau chief Josef Federman and Middle East region editor Dan Perry.
After receiving what he called “the necessary approvals,” Mr. Federman responded with a short statement that only partially addressed two of our 16 questions. (He offered to speak off-the-record about why AP would not respond to the others, but we declined the offer.) Follow-up questions on the photos were handled by Maya Alleruzzo, the AP’s Middle East regional photo editor, who issued brief responses that did not address crucial ethical issues—notably why the AP hasn’t told its subscribers that the photos were posed.
Responding appropriately to serious queries is not optional for the AP. It is a not-for-profit cooperative, owned by its media outlets, and it sets high ethical standards for itself. Its statement of “News Values and Principles,”says that questions about its reporting and any aspect of its work “should be taken seriously” by the wire service.
We approached our examination of the article wondering if the AP’s subscribers can trust this wire service in its reports from Gaza. Our conclusion is that they cannot.

The ‘Policeman’ Who Was a Terrorist
Let’s start at the top—literally: The photographs accompanying the February 13 article. AP ran eight, now available as a slideshow online.
The images are dramatic, showing survivors of Israeli air attacks walking or standing amid the ruins of what had been their homes. The lead photo (below) is especially heartrending. It shows a child standing amid the wreckage where his father, mother and two siblings were killed in an Israeli airstrike. The photo and its original caption, still unchanged at this writing, reads: “In this Tuesday, Nov. 25, 2014 photo, Khaled Malakeh, 6, stands on the rubble of his family house in the Zeitoun neighborhood in Gaza City, destroyed in an Israeli airstrike July 9. The attack killed his father, a Hamas policeman, his mother and two siblings. The sign in Arabic reads, ‘House of martyr Mostafa Jamal Malakeh (Abu Khaled).’ ”
The photo and its caption were were widely replicated by AP subscribers.
This photo is problematic from several perspectives. The first is that the caption is false.


http://observer.com/2015/03/how-the-ap-botched-its-investigation-of-civilian-deaths-in-the-israel-hamas-war/

Much more to read on the link
So many lies being promoted against Israel it seems to be an industry.