Critics reacted in alarm this week after the Donald W. Reynolds Journalism Institute at the University of Missouri awarded the Associated Press with a “Pictures of the Year” award for photos including an Israeli victim of Hamas.
The most controversial photograph shows the body of 23-year-old Shani Louk, a German-Israeli dual citizen who was kidnapped and murdered by Hamas, on the back of a truck. Video would later show Palestinians abusing her corpse.
We are devastated to share that the death of 23 year old German-Israeli Shani Luk was confirmed.
Shani who was kidnapped from a music festival and tortured and paraded around Gaza by Hamas terrorists, experienced unfathomable horrors.
Our hearts are broken .
May her memory… pic.twitter.com/cs0ii4XH7e
— Israel ישראל (@Israel) October 30, 2023
The Associated Press won “Team Picture Story of the Year” for its coverage of the “Israel and Hamas War.” The accompanying statement by the Reynolds Journalism Institute is riddled with inaccuracies: claiming that Hamas kidnapped “dozens” of people (in fact, hundreds); reciting Hamas statistics on the number of dead in Gaza without distinguishing between terrorists and civilians; and falsely claiming Israel had attacked safe humanitarian areas.
Breitbart News reached out for comment to Lynden Steele, the director of Pictures of the Year International, and received this reply:
RJI and POY strongly condemn the Hamas attack on Oct. 7, and we continue to mourn the loss of innocent lives and human suffering that is occurring in the ongoing conflict. Reactions to the Team Picture Story of the Year express the greater emotions related to that conflict.
This year and every year, the photos in the competition are selected by a panel of professional journalists tasked with identifying compelling representations of the significant news events of the year. While we understand the reactions to the pictures, we also believe that photojournalism plays an important role in bringing attention to the harsh realities of war.
The statement did not address the fact that the AP was found to have used at least one stringer in its coverage who had ties to Hamas and was pictured holding a weapon during the October 7 attack.
Another AP photojournalist allegedly encouraged civilians in Gaza to join the attack and the looting inside Israel. The AP has denied that it had any foreknowledge of the attack, despite having stringers embedded with Hamas terrorists.
Joel B. Pollak is Senior Editor-at-Large at Breitbart News and the host of Breitbart News Sunday on Sirius XM Patriot on Sunday evenings from 7 p.m. to 10 p.m. ET (4 p.m. to 7 p.m. PT). He is the author of the recent e-book, “The Zionist Conspiracy (and how to join it),” now available on Audible. He is also the author of the e-book, Neither Free nor Fair: The 2020 U.S. Presidential Election. He is a winner of the 2018 Robert Novak Journalism Alumni Fellowship. Follow him on Twitter at @joelpollak.
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