Dec 31 2012

New Year’s Eve Reflections: On the Guardian’s disproportionate focus on Israel


israel obsession imageWith 2012 coming to a close, I decided to look back at some the more popular CiF Watch posts.

First, here are the posts read most by our loyal readers – and more than a few of our opponents – over the last year.

While interest in these posts are not surprising, there was one popular post which caught my eye.  Here’s a CW post from Jan. 2, 2011, which still continues to get an awful lot of traffic.  

It was published nearly two years ago but is still garnering new viewers.

The post illustrates – via data illustrated at the site ‘Views of the World‘ – the Guardian’s egregiously disproportionate focus on the Jewish state in 2010, using the Guardian’s own compilation of of tags by country.  Specifically, stories about Israel came in 6th – behind only the UK, USA, Afghanistan, Iraq and China – in the Guardian for 2010 (1,008 stories about Israel in all).

Not surprisingly, Guardian data for 2011 showed almost identical results - despite the political turmoil and violence in the region due to the upheavals of the “Arab Spring”.

While I expect that the results for 2012 will be much the same as the prior two years, we’ll, of course, let you know when the new data is released by the Guardian.

Until then, we’d love to know your thoughts. 

While we’re continually documenting the Guardian’s institutional bias against Israel, what factors do you think contribute most to their editorial decision to devote so much space to covering – via both straight news stories and in ‘CiF’ commentary – the Jewish state?

To all of our (virtual) friends and respectful foes, here’s wishing you a Happy New Year from all of us at CiF Watch. 

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8 comments on “New Year’s Eve Reflections: On the Guardian’s disproportionate focus on Israel”

  3. Coupla reasons for the disproportionate focus:

    * The unholy alliance between the far left and radical Islam: as a champion of this alliance, the Guardian evidently feels compelled to continually pump out anti-Israel propaganda in order to fan the flames of hostility against Israel.

    * The compulsion which drives so many on the left: you have to wave a pro-Palestinian flag if you want to be taken seriously as a bold defender of the “oppressed” against the “oppressor,” and the more you strut around and wave it the more seriously you’ll be taken by your fellow travellers.

    * The journalists’ compulsion to tell the “big story” and the more they tell it the
    bigger, naturally, it becomes.

    * Who wants to cover the incredibly brutal, genocidal, hopeless conflicts in Africa when you can feel all cutting-edge and superior hacking grimly away on your laptop at a tiny country surrounded by vast numbers of enemies who greatly appreciate your propagandist efforts on their behalf?

    • The Guardian is a champion of the unholy alliance between the far left and radical Islam??
      In which parallel universe?

  5. Why the disproportionate focus?

    1. Arabs=ethnic=good. (The racism of low expectations.)

    2. America=bad (Israel is attacked criticized she is a staunch ally of America)

    3. Anti-Semitism. Recent research has demonstrated that constant, obsessive criticism of Israel (as compared to fair criticism) is indicative of anti-Semitism.

    4. Success of the Jewish state. It clearly rankles with the Guardian that Israel is a prosperous, vibrant democracy, and outshines Britain in many respects. This infuriates the British upper classes, from whose ranks the Guardian staff are drawn. These individuals are closet racists, who unconsciously feel that the British are innately superior, but would never admit it even to themselves. .

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