Not Worth Mentioning

I have just watched a video that's circulating on the Internet that depicts drunken, religious American Jews walking the streets of Jerusalem, bashing Obama and slurring African Americans. I am not so appalled by the sensationalism of the video, which is to be expected in an age where intelligent monkeys can produce, shoot, and edit video, but by the pathetic low that newspapers in Israel have sunken to by covering such a "story." The only reason I learned about it is because it has made it to the home page of both the Jerusalem Post and Haaretz websites.

At the risk of being the pot that calls the kettle black, I would like to call out these two "newspapers" for publishing stories about this manipulative, tasteless, and lowbrow video.

While I recognize the sad existence of these young, drunk, ignorant Jews that tend to migrate back and forth from NYC to Jerusalem, I have the good sense to realize that their extreme views are not representative of the population at large. Others do not. So why facilitate this distortion of reality for your readership?

I encourage the filmmakers to re-edit their material and put it in its proper context in order to make it something that closely resembles journalism. However, I don’t believe the filmmakers ever wanted to make anything greater than a bigoted piece of provocation designed to incite, misrepresent, and direct negative attention towards the subjects and most importantly, themselves.

What the Haaretz and Jpost should have editorialized is that this was actually more of an experiment on the effects of manipulative interviewing and camera induced groupthink on drunken teenagers than any sort of real political dialogue.

When real journalists do MOS or "man on the street" interviews they get a cross section of the population to speak. It seems like these provocateurs went to a couple bars on Ben Yehuda Street on a summer night in Jerusalem, where the average demographic is 18-21 American religious Jews who for the first time are able to purchase and consume alcohol legally.

This video should be part of a new series called "Yeshiva Boys Gone Wild."

In that context, I might actually watch it.

But for the writers of these stories to call the producers of this video "journalists" is an insult to the profession that they claim to be a part of.


Huffington Post Blog wisely rejected the video for having no journalistic merit.

Shame on Haaretz and Jpost for plunging their standards to these low levels in order to boost their popularity.


http://www.haaretz.com/hasen/spages/1092485.html

http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1244371044168&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FPrinter