Biased information about Israel in the French press is not an episodic occurrence. It is a systematic one. The main engine of this biased information industry is blatantly the Agence France Presse.
It is so thoroughly a “pro-Palestinian news agency” that this French institution does not see anything unethical about hiring Palestinian activists as reporters: “Nasser Abu Baker, the chairman of the Palestinian Journalists’ Syndicate, the leading force for the boycott of Israeli journalists and media, also writes for the influential French news agency.”
The same bias appears in the media and news agencies all over the developed world, including Reuters, the BBC and the AP. Why, when it comes to Israel, is such a misinterpretation of reality so generalized in the press? The only answer is that a war is in progress: a war of delegitimization.
On July 15, 2016, after the truck ramming that killed 84 people in Nice, France, Agence France Presse (AFP) released a report entitled, “When Vehicles Become Weapons”. It is the duty of a large news agency such as AFP to list, for its customers, examples of countries that are suffering from vehicular terrorism.
Concerning Israel, we can read in the third paragraph: “In Israel and the Palestinian territories, car-ramming attacks have featured heavily in a wave of violence that has killed at least 215 Palestinians, 34 Israelis, two Americans, an Eritrean and a Sudanese since October last year”.
A naïve reader might understand that in Israel and Palestinian territories, Jews and Muslims — or Israelis and Palestinians — find it amusing to use their vehicles to kill innocent passersby. He might think also that Jews are far better players of this gamer than are Muslims, because they killed “215 Palestinians” against only “34 Israelis.”
As the website Honest Reporting noticed:
“In fact, the total number of Israelis who have committed car ramming attacks against Palestinians is exactly zero, but a reader would have no way of knowing that. To the contrary, the AFP’s language gives the incorrect appearance that more Palestinians are targeted by car ramming attacks than Israelis.”
Biased information about Israel in the French press is not an episodic occurrence. It is a systematic one. The main engine of this biased information industry is blatantly the Agence France Presse.
AFP — like Reuters, Associated Press or Bloomberg — is a news agency with offices all over the world (150 countries and 200 bureaus). But it is not a private company; it is supposed to be a cooperative owned by customers (newspapers, radios and TV channels), but it is actually a state-owned company, heavily subsidized due to the large number of subscriptions from different French government ministries — especially the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. The managing director of AFP is appointed by the government. AFP is a tool of French diplomacy and is considered an arm of France’s cultural international influence.
AFP has a large “bureau” in Jerusalem and its journalists have an enormous influence on the European and Middle Eastern press. This influence is enormous because its reports are literally copied-and-pasted by newspapers and countless websites in France and Europe.