There is a special class of young, enterprising journalists and ‘experts’ who claim to have access to the inner thinking of the Lebanese resistance organization Hizbullah. Journalists with decades of on the ground experience in Lebanon like to mock them:
Elijah J. Magnier @ejmalrai – 6:49 AM – 3 Feb 2018
“Hezbollah experts”: “I was walking in “Hezbollah stronghold” & bumped into a man who turned out to be a “High commander”. As a sign of courtesy of our 1st encounter, revealed to me Hezbollah will attack 7 countries. He delivers all plans to me & went off”. U have to believe me.
The story below touches on that phenomenon. But there is more to it. Such journalists and experts are tools for planting Israel’s propaganda into the minds of their readers. That is the real plot behind this curious story.
A few days ago the Columbia Journalism Review published a whiny piece about dwindling foreign reporting in U.S. media:
The story is build around one U.S. freelance reporter in Lebanon, Sulome Anderson, who laments that her work is no longer requested or published. Like all other miserable issue in this world Anderson’s lack of income is caused by one Donald Trump:
Sulome blames a news cycle dominated by Donald Trump. Newspapers, magazines, and TV news programs simply have less space for freelance international stories than before—unless, of course, they directly involve Trump.
It that really the problem Anderson has?
Before the 2016 election cycle, Sulome would pitch a story once, maybe twice, before finding a home for it. Now she pitches anywhere from three to 10 editors before a story gets the green light, if it gets picked up at all.
Maybe it is not Trump but the crude propaganda, and abysmal sourcing Anderson tries to sell:
In October 2017, Sulome thought she had landed the story of her career. The US had just announced a $7 million reward for a Hezbollah operative believed to be scouting locations for terror attacks on American soil—something it had never done before. Having interviewed Hezbollah fighters for the last six years, Sulome had unique access to the upper echelons of its militants, including that specific operative’s family members. Over the course of her reporting, Hezbollah members told her they had contingency plans to strike government and military targets on US soil and that they had surface-to-air missiles, which had not been reported before.
Why didn’t she offer that story to The Onion – they would have had fun with it. Consider:
- Hizbullah is known for its extremely tight media control. There is no such media access, zero, none, to the “upper echelons” of Hizbullah – certainly not for some U.S. freelancer with a dubious background (see below).
- Hizbullah does not talk about its weapons to this or that journalist. If it wants to make a specific capability known, it will make a public announcements about it. That is what Hizbullah leader Hassan Nasrallah did when he said that Hizbullah could attack Haifa’s ammonia storage tanks. It was the announcement that Hizbullah had acquired a new, precise, mid-range missile.
- Will Hizbullah operatives talk to their family members about their secret business? Would those family members relate those secrets to some American freelancer? No and no.
- Hizbullah’s surface-to-air missiles have never been reported on? What about the 2006(!) IHS Janes report? MoA, this very site, wrote about them in 2008! Hizbullah leader Nasrallah publicly talked about them and Israel’s intelligence service confirmed the capability. Hizbollah is known to have MANPADS (see pic), SA-22 Pantsyr-1 systems and at least access to S-200 surface to air missiles including the necessary radar systems.
The CJR piece continues:
Convinced she had struck gold, she was elated when the piece was commissioned by a dream publication she’d never written for before. But days later, that publication rescinded its decision, saying that Sulome had done too much of the reporting before she was commissioned. Sulome was in shock. She went on to pitch the story to eight other publications, and no one was interested.
Obsessive Trump coverage let the editors turn that story down?
Or could it be that no one was interested in Sulome Anderson’s story because it was obvious propaganda crap? Could it be that no one was interested because Anderson’s claimed access to Hizbullah has for years been laughed about? Could it be that that no one was interested because her July 2017 story for Newsweek (scroll to its end) needed five(!) factual corrections and had additional serious problems? Because the video she made for Newsweek of alleged Hizbullah fighters she interviewed showed fighters with the insignia of Fatah al-Intifada, a Syrian-Palestinian group? Could it be because the fighting scenes in that video seemed staged? (In her rebuttal of those accusations Anderson admits some errors, obfuscates others, but also claims to have interviewed “a Hezbollah division leader”. Hizbullah is not organized like a conventional army. Its armed resistance does do not have “divisions” – nor does it have “division leaders”.)
No editor likes to publish pieces which will get flogged by experts and the public. Editors hate to publish corrections. It is the disaster of Anderson’s Newsweek story, not Donald Trump coverage, that prevents other editors from commissioning her with a similar piece.
Sulome Anderson has been duped for years by some enterprising Lebanese stringers who sell her “access to Hizbullah officials” by introducing her to their barber or some local thugs. An alternative explanation is that she is knowingly selling fairy-tales and propaganda. She certainly isn’t the only journalist with such a problem. In 2012 Vice published a widely shared – and ridiculed – story about Paintballing with Hezbollah in which four western journalist competed with four local dudes who falsely claimed to be “Hizbullah fighters”.
The CJR story about Sulome Anderson’s sales problem was written by Yardena Schwartz, a freelancer in Tel Aviv. Schwartz discloses that “Sulome was a classmate of mine at Columbia Journalism School from 2010 to 2011.” Having friends in Tel Aviv increases the chance that “upper echelons” of Hizbullah will trust you with knowledge about their plans and air-defense capabilities? Bragging about ones orthodox Jewish and Zionist boyfriend, as Anderson does, helps to pass through Hizbullah’s strict media controls?
Thinking this over one comes to see the propaganda plan behind this whole affair.
Consider: The U.S. puts some high reward on someone’s head for allegedly being Hizbullah and planning something nefarious within the United States. Next comes Sulome Anderson, who just by chance has access to the family of the dude. She also learns from “upper echelon” Hizbullah commanders that, yes, what the U.S. alleges is exactly what Hizbullah wants to do. Moreover – Hizbullah confesses to Anderson that it has all these scary MANPADS. Might it want to smuggle those into the States? Does it want to down Air Force One or a commuter flight out of New York?
That surely would have been a perfect scare story, an ‘independent’ confirmation of the U.S. allegations and another reason to put more sanctions on Hizbullah.
But no one in the U.S. was willing to publish that crap. After the Newsweek disaster Anderson’s claims of Hizbullah access had been seriously burned. The story would not stand.
Is there another way to plant the meme into American minds? How about a whiny story in the CJR, written by her friend in Tel Aviv, that simply repeats these claims? Not as good as ‘original’ reporting published in the New York Times but surely enough to put those claims on the record.
It is disappointing that CJR published this sorry excuse for the unreliable reporting of Sulome Anderson. Excessive Trump coverage in U.S. media may be a reason for less foreign reporting. Costs are certainly another one.
This case though is about factual errors, unreliable sourcing, planting pro-Israel propaganda or, at best, about getting duped by some local jokers.
Posted by b on February 3, 2018 at 10:02 AM | Permalink
Uprooted Palestinian 
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