Tag Archives: Gaza

Deadlines, Competition Shouldn’t Precede Media Ethics: Abu-Fadil

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Use and abuse of social media has become the “new battleground” in conflict coverage with Gaza being a recent example.

“A click is often faster than legwork to obtain information and shape it into good story form,” said Media Unlimited director Magda Abu-Fadil. “I believe the same rules apply to social media as legacy media in terms of coverage and good journalism, albeit in more condensed form and at greater speed: accuracy, balance, fairness, ethics.”

She discussed the implications in “Information wars: how journalists navigated social media in the Israel-Palestine conflict,” for the World Association of Newspapers and News Publishers (WAN-IFRA).

Screen shot of WAN-IFRA's Information Wars

Screen shot of WAN-IFRA’s Information Wars

Read more from Abu-Fadil on emotions, comments, images and videos used by warring factions via social media in a blogpost by Lucy Dean. A [PDF] version is available here.

MU Director Analyzes U.S. Media’s Gaza Coverage

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America’s NBC News buckled under pressure when it pulled correspondent Ayman Mohyeldin from Gaza after he tweeted about witnessing Israel’s killing of four boys on a beach, Media Unlimited director Magda Abu-Fadil told Al Arabiya English.

Ayman Mohyeldin (NBC-Al Arabiya)

Ayman Mohyeldin (NBC-Al Arabiya)

She said the Arab-American Mohyeldin, who was later reassigned to cover Gaza, acted professionally and that his reporting of the conflict pitting Israel against mostly unarmed civilians in the besieged and densely-populated strip accurately reflected events on the ground.

The comments can be downloaded here [PDF].

In earlier remarks also to Al Arabiya English, Abu-Fadil scrutinized the New York Times’  coverage of the war on Gaza saying she was surprised to learn the paper had been attacked for being anti-Israel.

She cautioned that media evaluation requires sustained monitoring and that lone tweets or occasional op-eds don’t determine a newspaper’s slant.

The comments can be downloaded here [PDF].