Indy Media Watch

I asked a fair question in an article I tried to post:

is DC Indymedia obsessed with demonizing Israel?
Critique of Israel is fine and fair, but a single-minded obsession with demonizing Israel, while failing to deal even handedly with the other contributors to the violence, well that's just dripping with antisemitism.

To investigate that question, I took a snapshot of DC Indymedia's website this afternoon (9/25)

I highlighted in red all the material was decidedly anti-Israel. I then highlighted all the articles that were critical of Hezbeollah & Syria's role in green.

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The result: almost half the articles on the site attack Israel. That's also true of the feature section, meaning this is the result of deliberate editorial choices, not just any particular group spamming the website.

As for articles in green (those critical of Syria, Hezbollah, etc.), well, there are exactly none.

However, that's not where the troubling behavior ended. When I posted my article and image, editors didn't just hide the article, they deleted it with the note that it was a process/editorial issue and a fabrication.

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From what I can tell, editors do routinely hide material that's critical of their editorial decisions, but they don't usually go so far as to delete them. Now apparently anything that raises the issue of anti-semitism--particularly when it's substantiated with evidence--well, that they'll single out to delete. It violates their own policy, and it certainly violates Indymedia's stated principle of open publishing.

Their remark of it being a fabrication was actually the only fabrication going on. I included the image in my article so others could see the evidence themselves. Moreover, I made sure it was large enough so that people could read the text and see that the image was genuine and that the stories were fairly
marked.

Honestly, I don't understand why this site is even considered an Indymedia site. It's obvious the editors have no commitment to open publishing. They're willing to be hypocritical and lie in the course of running the site. To top it all off, they're representing themselves as a leftist news site when it looks like they're actually running a very authoritarian site with a nasty string of racism.

Permalink # posted by Dan @ 5:57 AM | |