The Guardian shows a clip of the recent armed confrontations in Hebron due to the riots by Jewish settlers. I had read earlier about B’Tselem handing out small camera’s to Palestinians so they could record settler aggression and this is a clip that came out of that program.
This is a precursor to how amateur media are going to become even more important to the dissemination of news and how new media can flatten information asymmetry quite effectively.
One question remains about asymmetry and that is asymmetry in mainstream media reporting. The British press has a reputation to have one of the more fair and balanced reports on the conflict (as does for instance Ha’aretz)1. I am curious if Dutch mainstream media have aired this fairly graphic clip, I can’t find anything on either the NOS player2or the main NOS site3 and neither on RTL Nieuws.
Anybody seen this on Dutch television?
- Though odd that I couldn’t find it at the Independent. [↩]
- Maybe because the search and the interface of that player are completely atrocious. [↩]
- Except for this brief blurb about today’s events. [↩]
I have no idea what’s going on in that clip and who’s who though. Without any commentary it’s rather hard to make sense of what your seeing don’t you think?
Saw this clip on ‘the Zapservice’, during Pauw en Witteman. (with comments)
@Tijs: The Guardian piece gives describes the happenings in the clip but yes, it is a jumble of angry shooting people.
@Eelke: What kind of comments? No chance that you can link up the relevant bit of the episode, right?
They’ve been publishing the clips from those camera’s for a while. It used to be called ‘shooting back’, but appearantly someone else allready claimed that name, so nowadays it is just the ‘video’ section on their website.
It’s regularly shocking, but I never see much of it in the Dutch press.
If you had told me 20 years ago that there would be a time that I would agree with Dries van Agt I’d have laughed my ass off, since he was the symbol of all that was wrong with the CDA for me. But these days he is one of the few mainstream politicians who speak up and (on his website) explain that he only saw the truth after visiting the Occupied Territories. If only he could convince partymembers like Maxime Verhagen…
One of the reasons I’m less happy with the appointment of Hillary Clinton as SOS in the US is that she has always been very hawkishly pro-Israel. In view of the impact the US attitude has that means not much will change in the near future.
@marbel: Well Hillary was senator for New York, so that shouldn’t come as too big of a surprise.
I have thought Dutch VVD’s and CDA’s slavish following of Israel was bothersome for a while, but it is also a source of internal tension. Add to that the partialness of Dutch mainstream media who normally are so left in all matters, but will happily send ethnically biased reporters to that particular conflict area.
I need to do more research, but this post on Sargasso comes close. I recently read Israel-Palestine on Record which has also been mostly ignored in Dutch and American mainstream media (you’d think the Times would publish a retort if they could think of one).
In the Netherlands you can follow Anja Meulenbelts weblog, she keeps good track of what happends and what is reported in the Dutch press.
http://anjameulenbelt.sp.nl/weblog/
I should have said ‘in Dutch’ of course 🙂