Folks, you’re not going to believe this, but it all makes sense now. In the excerpt below from an article in the National Business Review by Francis Till, one of the most direct sources of Reuter’s bias is identified, front and center:
A recent Tom Gross piece in the National Review points to some structural problems within the organisational structure of the news agency… Mr Gross says that the main problem with Reuters’ bias in the Middle East may be traced to one person: Wafa Amr, Reuters’ “Senior Palestinian Correspondent”.
Wafa Amr is a cousin of former Palestinian minister Nabil Amr with close family ties to Yasser Arafat. Nabil Amr is widely seen as a moderate and has recently had his house shot at by Yasser Arafat’s al-Aqsa brigade for criticising the chairman, but is a dedicated member of the Palestinian leadership with all the baggage that entails.
Her job title was invented for her — Mr Gross notes that there is no equivilent ‘Senior Israeli Correspondent’ — to exploit her ties to the Palestinian Authority.
As what he describes as one former Reuters journalist put it to Mr Gross: ‘She occupies this position in spite of lacking a basic command of English grammar. The information passed through her is controlled, orchestrated. Reuters would never allow Israeli government propaganda to be fed into its reports in this way. Indeed, stories exposing Israeli misdeeds are a favorite of Reuters. Amr has never had an expose’ on Arafat, or his Al-Aqsa Brigades terror group.’
But, he says, things may be about to change, organisationally — which could radically change the way the conflict is being reported. In part, that’s because Reuters has appointed a new Jerusalem bureau chief and appears to be removing some of the one-sidedness from its reports from the region.”