Thursday, October 18, 2007

Dutch Journalist receives Prize for Book on Media Distortion about the Middle East


The journalist Joris Luyendijk has received yet another prize for his book Het zijn net mensen (They are like Human Beings). The book has sold 125,000 copies. It claims that free media cannot function in the Arab world and tells how the media distort reporting from the Middle East. Luyendijk also tells how he participated in this process for many years.

http://www.elsevier.nl/nieuws/society/artikel/
asp/artnr/174860/index.html


Comment: The distortion of information by some Dutch journalists led to the creation of this blog. One of these is Luyendijk. Also, in his prize-winning book the author shows major prejudice regarding the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In the 80 pages devoted to this in the book, there is no reference to the fact that the Hamas Charter calls for the mass murder of Jews. For an English review of his book in English, see http://www.jcpa.org/JCPA/Templates/ShowPage.asp?DBID=1&TMID=111&LNGID=1&FID=388&PID=0&IID=1895

5 comments:

Unknown said...

Hi All you should go and read this article. Simply mind blowing.

http://dutchconcerns.blogspot.com/2007/07/bad-news-from-holland.html

Liorah said...

After reading this I am truly ashamed to be a dutch born person. What ever happened to supporting the ONLY democracy in the middle east??
To my fellow dutch this: you don't get it, it doesnot matter how much property the Israeli's give up. It will NEVER be enough. The muslims want to destroy Israel, because a democracy in their midst is just not tolerated.

Yehudi said...

This article is shameful. For those of us who are Jewish, we need to make aliyah and strengthen Israel.

succah said...

And this is 'bad news from the Netherlands', because...

Anne the Man said...

I had a hard time reading 'Het zijn net mensen' by Joris Luyendijk.
What he does is to relate a couple of facts, analyzes how these are portrayed and how this results in a certain image that Dutch people (or people in general) get from Israel and from the Palestinians.
The tricky thing is that the analysis seems very compelling, and I am sure Luyendijk believes in it himself, but I kept thinking that what he describes is how it works for only part of the media consumers. On others it will work quite to the opposite - so I have noticed.
In broader terms, he makes a couple of assumptions about perception that as such are not generally true.
For example, if a press conference by Sharon seems orderly and one with Arafat messy, it does not mean EVERYBODY thinks Arafat is a crook and Sharon a statesman. I know there are lots of people who perceive the Sharon orderliness as cleverly directed and thus inherently untrustworthy and the messy, emotional Arafat with crowd as genuine and thus truthfully.