Western Media: Enabling Arab Autocracy?

Khaled Abu Toameh writing for the Hudson Institute in New York lambasts what he describes as Western media’s “hypocritical approach” to covering human rights abuses in the Arab world. According to Toameh, the media leaps to report on stories of Israeli abuse against Arabs, while largely refusing to cover human rights violations committed against Arabs by their own dictatorial states. Toameh says that “the mainstream media in the US, Canada and Europe are turning a blind eye to recent developments in Jordan, where the government has introduced a law that restricts media freedom.” Further, he cites the Palestinian Authority’s recent arrest of seven Palestinian university lecturers in the West Bank– a story that only one of “at least a dozen foreign correspondents and newspaper editors in North America and Europe” chose to run –as an example of the media’s “double-standards” approach to news items, stating, “One can only imagine the reaction of the international media had the Palestinian academics been arrested by Israel.” Toameh also asserts that this pattern is “not a new phenomenon,” arguing that “many Western correspondents based in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv refused to publish stories about bad government, abuse of human rights and rampant financial corruption under Yasser Arafat‘s administration.”