Little Green Footballs published an amazing article describing the business model of Associated Press TV News, which provides raw video images to all major broadcasters in much the same way AP and Reuters provides raw photographs to newspapers.
It has many of the inherent problems that the wire services have that can skew the news for the pro-Arab agenda: hiring local stringers to take the video and providing their own descriptions of the events which may or may not be biased or even accurate. The subscribing news services like BBC, CNN and Fox decide what to air and how to describe it, but the basic information is provided by APTN.
The most troubling part, though, is that Arab states hire the same APTN to provide entire newscasts for them, not just clips. The same people who have to create news programs for Arab TV (with the biases that they require) are coworkers with the ones who provide the supposedly unbiased clips. This has two effects: the initial footage is slanted towards what Arab audiences want to see, and access to historic video has to be approved by APTN. As the author of the article mentions, this may be why the TV news never shows Palestinian celebrations of 9/11 or the Arab lynch mob in Ramallah in clips - AP may be refusing to allow such "sensitive" video to be rebroadcast.
Read the whole article. If the media's entire business model is skewed against impartiality, these things need to be exposed.
And kudos to LGF for becoming the premiere media critic on the planet today.
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