IDF and New Media
The Jerusalem Post reports that Israel’s army has caught on to the world of Web 2.0:
The IDF has spent the past six months learning to fight a different kind of media war, developing a capacity to take its message to the ‘new media,’ a general term for a wide variety of on-line social networking, user-generated news and personalized content sites.
“In terms of communicating our message, new media is the future,” Brig.-Gen. Avi Benayahu, the IDF’s spokesman, told The Jerusalem Post.
Benayahu has overseen a new orientation in the spokesman’s unit toward these on-line outlets, even taking his unit’s senior officers to an intensive new media workshop at the Interdisciplinary Center, Herzliya in mid-2008. This has translated into a profusion of new initiatives across the Internet.
A YouTube channel established by the IDF a day after the fighting began has become the second-most popular channel on the popular global video-sharing site, drawing over 386,000 page views in the first half of Thursday alone.
Meanwhile, the IDF has been in regular contact with over 50 major American blogs covering the fighting.
ithin Israel, a new video-on-demand channel will launch over the weekend on the HOT cable network carrying nothing but IDF footage from the fighting. Even Israel’s major cellular companies, Pelephone, Cellcom and Orange, will begin offering the army footage over 3G cell phones in the coming days.
As for the IDF’s upbeat assessment about media coverage, we suspect the army must have missed heavily biased reports such as this one by CNN.
More from SNAPSHOTS
CNN’s Amanpour Condemns “power grab” By Israel’s Prime Minister and Others
April 1, 2020
We’ve said it often, but it’s worth repeating: Anyone interested in reasonably unbiased information about Israel (at least) should avoid the broadcasts of CNN’s Chief International Correspondent and Anchor, Christiane Amanpour. In characterizing responses to [...]
Seattle Media Oblivious To Imam’s Hateful Indoctrination Condemning Jews
January 7, 2020
The Masjid Ar-Rahmah mosque teaching – that Allah transformed Jews into apes and pigs for disobeying him – delivered by Imam (prayer leader) Mohamad Joban – was posted online by mosque personnel. This December 2019 [...]
AP Distorts: Bethlehem ‘Almost Completely Surrounded’
December 10, 2019
Over two years after improving inaccurate language falsely citing Israel's security "barrier surrounding the biblical city" of Bethlehem, the Associated Press once again misrepresents. AP's Joseph Krauss and Mohammad Daraghmeh wrote yesterday ("Palestinians in Bethlehem [...]
Reuters Errs on Administrative Detention For ‘Anti-Israel Activity’
November 5, 2019
The Ofer Prison, near Ramallah (Photo by Tamar Sternthal) A Reuters article today egregiously misrepresents administrative detention, erroneously asserting that it is mainly applied to "Palestinians suspected of anti-Israeli activities," when in fact the Israeli [...]