Iran has banned the Reuters news agency for calling Iranian women training in martial arts “assassins” in a report. A spokesman for the Ministry of Culture said, “The decision was taken following the production of a video clip by this news agency’s video department branding some Iranian female athletes who practice ninjutsu as terrorists.” At first, the headline read, “Thousands of female Ninjas train as Iran’s assassins” but it was later changed to, “Three thousand women Ninjas train in Iran.”
Banning Reuters is ironic because the news agency has long whitewashed Muslim terrorists as well as demonizing Iran’s stated enemy, Israel.
In 2009, at the World Economic Forum, Nakhle El Hage, Director of News and Current Affairs at Al Arabiya, said of the Arab media:
We tell people what they want to hear. If they want to see pictures of massacres, we show them. If they want us to tell them that any Arab or Muslim killed in any part of the world, even if he or she are terrorists, are martyrs, also we can win the people.
Caroline Drees, the Reuters Middle East editor, responded, “Why is it a problem? Who are we to educate the audience of what they should want?”
Reuters called Terry Jones, who burned a Koran, a “radical, fundamentalist Christian” and an “extremist Christian preacher.” Meanwhile, the Muslims who killed ten people in response, including slitting one throat, were given much warmer treatment: “More volatile protests are possible across deeply religious Afghanistan …”
In 2011 a study published by Henry Silverman of Roosevelt University in the Journal of Applied Business Research showed that Reuters’ coverage of the Middle East conflict was systematically tainted by propaganda against Israel. Silverman analyzed fifty news articles through the prism of Reuters’ own guide to ethical principles for reporting, and found over 1,100 incidences of overt propaganda and ethical violations that vilified Israel while supporting the Palestinian Arabs and their supporters.
Iran’s cutting off its nose despite its face. But that seems to be the pattern these days.
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