CAMERA Featured Letter-Writer
After CAMERA researchers highlighted the fact that an AFP reporter doubles as a Fatah politician, one of our letter-writers, Daniel H. Trigoboff, Ph.D., sent the following letter to AFP:
To The Editor,
A central policy of Agence France-Presse reads, “Truth, impartiality and plurality are Agence France-Presse’s golden rules. These values guarantee rigorous, verified news, free from political or commercial influence.” Unfortunately in your employment of Nasser Abu Baker, you are in violation of your own policy. This is because in addition to reporting on Palestinian affairs for you, he was a candidate for the Fatah Council, and leads a campaign to boycott Israel.
Therefore the chances his reports will be impartial and free from political bias are precisely zero. This has been reflected in numerous slanted, inaccurate, and anti-Israel falsehoods in his articles for AFP on the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
Abu Baker has also advocated boycotting Israeli reporters, in inflammatory propaganda which has compromised their safety. As a result few Israeli reporters have safe access to Palestinian areas, which are therefore insufficiently covered in the media.
Employing Abu Baker as your reporter makes a mockery of AFP policy, and contaminates AFP news coverage with fanatical anti-Israel bias. The French Resistance journalists who founded AFP in 1944, in service of journalism uncontaminated by tyranny, would surely disapprove of Abu Baker’s status in your organization. So will anyone else who values even a shred of journalistic ethics.
Daniel H. Trigoboff, Ph.D.
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