Downer slams media over war
by Mark Dodd, The Australian

THE media has been attacked by Foreign Minister Alexander Downer for dishonesty, lazy journalism and ignoring the facts in its reporting of the Lebanon conflict.

Mr Downer said media reports in Australia and around the world tended to treat all Lebanese casualties as civilians when, in truth, many of those killed or injured were armed Hezbollah militants.

He also accused some of the world's top news outlets, including London-based Reuters, of fraudulent coverage following Israel's recent offensive into southern Lebanon.

The criticism took place in Brisbane during an address to the National Newspaper Publishers Conference.

The Foreign Minister said standards of decency, respect for others and self-restraint were important elements for the media to consider. Mr Downer opened his remarks on Lebanon by strongly denying media claims his ministry had been slow off the mark to provide assistance to thousands of Lebanese Australian passport-holders.

But he saved his strongest criticism for the war coverage.
"What concerns me greatly is the evidence of dishonesty in the reporting out of Lebanon. For example, a Reuters photographer was forced to resign after doctoring images to exaggerate the impact of Israeli air attacks," he said, adding that widespread reporting of an Israeli air strike on a Lebanese Red Cross ambulance had fallen for a hoax.

"Yet, some of the world's most prestigious media outlets, including some of those represented here today (Monday), ran that story as fact -- unchallenged, unquestioned," he said.

There had been a tendency to report every casualty on the Lebanese side of the conflict as a civilian casualty despite indisputable evidence that many of the injured from the Israeli offensive were Hezbollah combatants.

Chris Warren, the federal secretary of the Media, Entertainment and Arts Alliance union, said Mr Downer's remarks showed an unfortunate but increasing trait of governments to try to dictate conflict reporting.

He said journalists occasionally got facts wrong, but he rejected the Foreign Minister's claims of shoddy reporting from Lebanon.

"I don't think journalists have got it so egregiously wrong as some governments did on weapons of mass destruction," Mr Warren said, referring to the arguments used by the US, Britain and Australia to go to war in Iraq.

Mr Downer's attack showed " a profound misunderstanding of the pressures media organisations are under", Mr Warren said.

Democrats deputy leader Andrew Bartlett described the Foreign Minister's comments as "extraordinary".

"To suggest the Australian media is anti-Israeli is a very dodgy assertion," he said.