Public Diplomacy Minister Galit Distel-Atbaryan is going head-to-head with the foreign press after the Foreign Press Association (FPA), which represents the foreign reporters in Israel, demanded she remove a video her ministry posted on social media that warns against "skewed reporting in the international media."
The controversy began when the Ministry of Public Diplomacy published a video in which Israeli news personality Lital Shemesh warned of the misleading foreign media. "Start by being critical when consuming information from international media outlets," Shemesh states at the beginning of the video.
The video mentions several instances of misreporting on the part of foreign media, including one instance when CNN's Christiane Amanpour reported that Lucy Dee and her two daughters were killed in a "shootout" while they were, in fact, unarmed and driving along a road on their way to a family weekend when they were brutally killed by Arab terrorists in a shooting attack.
"This is not journalism. This problem must be dealt with, it must be exposed," concludes Shemesh,
"When you see an anchor in an American news studio claiming that there was a 'shootout between the Dee girls and a Palestinian' or when you hear a report about a 'car that hit two children who were standing on the sidewalk,' (instead of a terrorist ramming attack that purposely killed three people, two of them young boys, ed.) know that usually, only one writer from a news agency sent the report to be seen by hundreds of millions of people around the world," Public Diplomacy Minister Galit Distel-Atbaryan stated.
She criticized sentences written in indirect form that do not state explicitly that ramming and shooting attacks were done by terrorists..
The FPA took offense to the video, writing in a letter to the Minister: "This language undermines democratic values and the free press and can endanger journalists in Israel who run into more and more problems from parts of the public."
Minister Distel was not moved by the letter and insisted that the video would not be removed: "My war for spreading the truth has just begun," she wrote, "Israel is a democratic state that sees freedom of expression as holy, but as Public Diplomacy Minister, I will not allow skewed reporting to go on in our back yard without a proper response."
According to a report in Haaretz, several spokespersons from various groups in the defense establishment and government offices were asked to share the video. Some of the spokespersons who regularly work with the media outlets mentioned in the video, criticized the clip and claimed that it is a sure way to "launch a war with the international press." Distel, however, believes that the war against Israel finds expression in a skewed international press and that what she is doing is a counterattack.