Israeli news censors waging all-out war on the truth

Ron Alridge

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Transcribed from the clipping

BULLETS AND BOMBS aren't the only obstacles network news departments are encountering as they cover Israel's invasion of Lebanon. The American television networks also are contending with severe government censorship by the supposedly democratic government of Israel. Apparently, some of the censorship is imposed for political rather than military reasons.

Not a single network story, not a single piece of video tape, can be transmitted out of the Israeli-run satellite transmission facility without first being screened by an Israeli military censor. Even scripts are reviewed. Furthermore, an Israeli official must have been present when the story was gathered.

With war-ravaged Lebanon's transmission center closed and with other facilities difficult to reach, the American networks desperately need to use the Israeli satellite equipment. Without a green light from an Israeli censor, the networks not only can't use that equipment, they can't even ship their stories out of Israel by other means, such as airplanes.

THE CENSORSHIP IS not enforced at gunpoint, but any network that bucks the system can have big problems. ABC already has run into trouble. In late June, ABC taped an interview with Yasser Arafat, head of the Palestine Liberation Organization and an enemy thoroughly despised by Israel. An Israeli censor looked at the story and told ABC not to transmit it.

No explanation was given at the time, but the Israeli censor obviously imposed the blackout to keep Arafat's views off of American television.

The ABC interview involved no troop movements, new weapons or other military secrets that Israel's censorship supposedly is designed to protect. [Israel has since explained to ABC that, when it comes to censorship, there are no real differences between political and military considerations; that the two are too closely related to separate.] ABC still was fuming when NBC managed to get its own Arafat interview past an Israeli censor and onto a satellite.

At that, ABC angrily and defiantly beamed its story back to America without Israeli permission. The network was subsequently denied use of the Israeli transmission equipment for two days. “IT WAS A CLEAR and transparent effort to impose political censorship,” says a still-fuming George Watson, vice president for news at ABC.

“It's really a nightmare,” Jeremy Lamprecht, director of foreign news for NBC, says of the censorship in general. “It's capricious and arbitrary.” “It can vary from censor to censor,” says Ed Joyce, executive vice president of CBS News, “because it's all going through the filter of an individual human mind who is the censor and who has the power to be totally arbitrary.”

Israel also has censored reports of civilian casualties in Lebanon, though not in recent days. That censorship, too, apparently was motivated more by politics than military security. After all, killing innocent people seldom wins votes in the campaign for international support.

How this transcription was made

Masthead not readable on the scan. The label on the slide read: UNCONFIRMED by masthead — Maria's slide label pairs this slide as “Chicago Tribune July 7 1982 / Boston Globe April 15 1984”, and this is the CHICAGO TRIBUNE item, the FIRST label, applied to the SECOND image. — ORDER REVERSED ON THIS SLIDE. See s081_1. This image is the Chicago Tribune 1982 column and s081_1 is the Boston Globe 1984 story, which is the opposite of the order Maria's label implies.

Cite this clipping

"Israeli news censors waging all-out war on the truth," (newspaper unidentified), 7 July 1982. Covering Palestine archive, CP-1982-067. https://coveringpalestine.org/archive/cp-1982-067